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Must-Read from Tom Sullivan on Biden’s Speech - contrast with the cluelessness of The NY Times [1]
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Date: 2022-09-02
Tom Sullivan writing at Digby’s place has done a masterful job of analyzing Biden’s speech in defense of democracy and the soul of America. “Biden Bumps Back” riffs off some dialog from the movie Hellboy, as Sullivan quotes at the conclusion.
Finally, this quote from Hellboy comes to mind: Professor Trevor ‘Broom’ Bruttenholm : In the absence of light, darkness prevails. There are things that go bump in the night, Agent Myers. Make no mistake about that. And we are the ones who bump back.
It’s about time someone did; Sullivan provides context that illustrates why the speech was necessary:
Whaddya know? The anti-democracy, pro-insurrection, authoritarian cult of personality that gleefully brands Democrats America-hating, child-trafficking, Marxist pedophiles can dish it out but can’t take it. Thursday night, President Joe Biden dished back in a primetime speech outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. I guess I’m in synch with Never Trumper Rick Wilson on this one. "Biden risks backlash" from people who routinely call him a communist groomer pedophile hitler is, to be sure, an unsurprising development.
x "Biden risks backlash" from people who routinely call him a communist groomer pedophile hitler is, to be sure, an unsurprising development. — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) September 2, 2022
What Biden has done is something that is (finally) putting Republicans on the defensive:
Biden did what Wisconsin Democratic state chair Ben Wikler told an August Netroots Nation panel he’d heard from a former Republican debate champion [timestamp 54:30]: “What you want to do is draw the circle that includes you and your audience around values, things that you all agree on, and then push the other side out of the circle.” “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” Biden began and then pushed. Hard. “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Read the whole thing — Sullivan does a great job of analyzing all the ways what Biden had to say impacts the situation we find ourselves in. The post at the link includes video of the speech ; here’s the text version from the White House website.
He also quotes Charlie Pierce, who predicted the dilemma Biden’s speech poses for the media:
Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce anticipated the discomfort that the “both sides” media would have in stating the facts as bluntly as Biden did: Here’s the problem for the elite political media: To cover the threat to the republic truthfully, they’re going to have to write/broadcast things that have collateral benefits to the Democratic Party. No way around it. The point is not to worry about that.
x Here's the problem for the elite political media: To cover the threat to the republic truthfully, they're going to have to write/broadcast things that have collateral benefits to the Democratic Party. No way around it. The point is not to worry about that. — Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 2, 2022
Case in point : compare and contrast this analysis in The New York Times by Peter Baker and Blake Hounshell, The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger. The two contort themselves into pretzels to frame it as a “both-sides” situation. The initial paragraphs are all about how Biden has moved away from trying to unite the country:
..“Sadly, we have gotten away from a common understanding that democracy is a process and does not necessarily guarantee the results your side wants, that even if your team loses an election, you can fight for your policies another day,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy globally and recently has expressed concern for it at home as well. “That’s a huge challenge for the president, but also for all politicians.”
Except it’s not Democrats who have gotten away from the idea that democracy is a process. Here’s some more.
..And so, instead of bringing Americans together, the president’s goal has essentially evolved into making sure that the majority of the country that opposes Mr. Trump is fully alert to the threat that the former president still poses — and energized or scared enough to do something about it, most immediately in the upcoming midterm elections.
Actually, Biden is explicit in his wish to bring the country together. (Nice of them to acknowledge the majority of the country opposes Trump.) Compare and contrast the way Baker and Hounshell frame it with this quote from Biden’s speech:
That’s why tonight I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology. (Applause.) We’re all called, by duty and conscience, to confront extremists who will put their own pursuit of power above all else.
Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy.
The cluelessness of Baker and Hounshell really manifests in this gobsmacking description of the Republican reaction — which apparently surprises them :
Quietly? Apparently these innocents have never watched Fox News, listened to Rush Limbaugh, or Newt Gingrich. Somehow they missed how GOP politicians have gone out of their way to out-Trump Trump in expressing their disgust for Democrats, the lies they have told, the threats of violence they have made — including against the press.
It’s not until ELEVEN paragraphs into this piece of The NY Times patented both-sides framing that they bother to note a wee bit of a difference between the two parties:
When it comes to democracy in America, there is no real equivalence, of course. The elder Mr. Trump sought to use the power of his office to overturn a democratic election, pressuring state and local officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own vice president to disregard the will of the people to keep him in office. When that did not work, he riled up a crowd that stormed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes and threatening to execute those standing in Mr. Trump’s way.
emphasis added
The journalism phrase for this is called “burying the lede”.
Also not mentioned: Trump was impeached twice, engaged in blatant nepotism, churned through administration staff looking for dependable/expendable toadies, has ties to Russia, and other acts of corruption too numerous to mention. His entire career before entering politics is of no matter to these two.
Also not mentioned: the Republican Party was and is fully on board with all of that. They want more.
Sullivan references the idea of “drawing a circle” to put MAGA Republicans on the outside; here’s how the duo at the Times frames it:
..Democratic strategists have spent months quietly amassing research on how to brand the Republican Party as extremist during an election cycle when Mr. Trump is not on the ballot.
It’s not about branding Republicans as extremist — it’s about telling the truth about them. As opposed to their opposite approach — smear and fear.
..The project was the brainchild of Navin Nayak, the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the research arm of a Democratic-aligned think tank. Working with John D. Podesta, a former aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who was appointed Friday as a senior adviser to Mr. Biden, Mr. Nayak began with a key insight. Republicans, the two men concluded, had been remarkably successful in defining the Democratic Party by its leftward-most pole. In recent years, that has been represented by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who helpfully for Republicans calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Republican strategists seized on the word “socialist,” spending millions of dollars in television advertisements in places like Miami to appeal to Hispanic voters whose families had long and painful memories of leftist governments in Cuba and Venezuela. In the 2020 election, Republicans picked off enough Hispanics to put Florida out of reach for Mr. Biden.
Republicans have apparently convinced the The NY Times that Bernie Sanders is the equivalent of Trump — ideologically extreme and with a death grip on the Democratic Party — and also an equal threat to America. (See David Brooks on this, as deconstructed by Bethesda.)
Baker and Hounshell — again — have apparently been oblivious to the GOP’s decades-long campaign to demonize Democrats as an existential threat to America. You’d think they’d never listened to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, or read Newt Gingrich on Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
..This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used. While the list could be the size of the latest "College Edition" dictionary, we have attempted to keep it small enough to be readily useful yet large enough to be broadly functional. The list is divided into two sections: Optimistic Positive Governing words and phrases to help describe your vision for the future of your community (your message) and Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic party.
emphasis added
Guess which section of the list is intended for use on Democrats. Take a look if you’ve never seen it; it’s relatively short, but Republicans have been using it since 1996 and have been doubling down on it ever since. If Democrats are only now getting serious about message discipline, well it’s nearly past time.
Baker and Hounshell close with this observation about Biden’s effort to distinguish MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy that should unite everyone else — regardless of party — to resist them:
That is not a message, as the Quinnipiac poll indicated, that will resonate with everyone. The question is whether it will resonate with enough Americans to make a difference.
It’s difficult to avoid the impression that Baker and Hounshell see this as a purely political question, a matter of strategy, and have no concerns that it might be a matter of survival for America as a functioning democracy.
This description of their careers at the bottom of their essay explains much — it looks like they are both denizens of the Inside the Beltway press that has served us so badly — and given the Republican Party so much cover over the years.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last five presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He is the author of seven books, most recently “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” with Susan Glasser, to be published in September. @peterbakernyt • Facebook Blake Hounshell is the editor of the On Politics newsletter. He previously was managing editor for Washington and politics at Politico. @blakehounshell
Charlie Pierce has some observations about the speech that seem rather more on target than the clueless nattering of the Times:
..Outside Independence Hall, some jackasses with a bullhorn kept hollering, “Fck Joe Biden,” and that stupid Brandon thing, which is their super-secret code that they can only decipher with the super-secret decoder ring that they got for sending in 100 box tops from Fcknuts Cereal. But heckling this president on the stump is like heckling a veteran comic in a club. He’s heard it all and he knows how to turn it back. "Those folks you hear on the other side there. They’re entitled to be outrageous. This is a democracy. Good manners is nothing they’ve ever suffered from, but history and common sense tell us that opportunity, liberty and justice for all are most likely to come to pass in a democracy." Thus did a president, a real, honest-to-god one and not a balloon in a suit, turn the howling of idiots into an object lesson to back up what the purpose of his speech was all about. Just as a purely political moment, this was golden. ...The “not every Republican” thing got a pained sigh from me in the moment, but then I reflected on the fact that this wasn’t an appeal for now. It was an appeal for November, and for 2024. He was offering them an off-ramp before their whole thing goes over into the Gorge Of Eternal Peril. If they choose not to take it, then that’s their choice, and the president was emphasizing that it can be a politically perilous one. It’s on you now, he was saying to them. ...If he can turn “MAGA Republican” into a political curse word, like “McCarthyism,” or what the GOP has done to the word “liberal,” or, say,“Nixon,” his administration and his entire political career would be justified.
emphasis added
More of this, please.
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