By Bob Dorn
Get ready for the message: Democrats need to move toward the center. That’s it, that’s all you need to know from the political professionals whom we pay to tell us who we are and what we think.
Picture them. You have Brian Williams, the hippest of that knot of strange guys in a hotel bar who anchor the nightly news of the three traditional used-to-be’s: ABC, CBS and NBC. The truth is, these guys don’t really carry the anesthesia and toxins for our political elite; they just introduce the heavyweights who do. But they’re the most important of the traditional media.
Scott Pelley, and what’s-it over at ABC and Brian Williams are the ones in the bar who seem to know who’s got the goods. They mostly look like second-stringers, or backup singers; their too-tight suits and subtle blebs help us see they’re just like us, just folks who’ve been placed momentarily in the spotlights and the corner offices. But they’re the ones who point their fingers and start up the choruses of specialists who call out the numbers and quote the right people and bring on the soloists and the experts.
Over at FOX, the non-traditional hell-center of Big Money (ever hear of Rupert Murdoch?), the approach is different. No false equivalencies here, no one’s going to say, for instance, that some Georgia state senator has it wrong when he advocates shipping negroes back to Liberia, but on the other hand strict voter identification cards are a good idea. At FOX they’ll just go with the i.d. cards and leave race out of it.
Plus, they’re not as pretty (unless they’re women). You got your Krauthammer (doesn’t he look like his name?), a real slasher. He looks like something you might put back in the shopping bag so you can get your money back. He’s, well, sort of rotten.
The point is, you know what you’re getting from FOX. You’re no longer in that convention hotel bar, it’s more like you’ve been transported to a German putschist beer hall in the early 30s. No references to Obama’s unpopularity; they just hate him and say so. The people in FOX studios aren’t democrats, nor are they Democrats, who more and more will follow their orders.
Back among the respectable and more conventional, the signs and signals of Big Media are more subtle and personal, for sure. It’s easier to identify with them — Judy Woodruff’s taste in clothes, what’s-it over at ABC so non-threatening… all that stuff counts if your job requires you to tell people the GOP/Democrats are just like you and me.
It’s interesting that with all the disease and warfare and road rage and racial and religious bigotry and jobless numbers (which ignore the evidence outside your door and on the boulevard dividers at the traffic lights that more and more people are in misery) despite all these growing problems, many of them so much like those that occurred during The Great Depression, the Democrats have to move closer to the center.
Didn’t Scott Peters (Peter Scott?) already try to do that? Wasn’t he the guy who voted against Obama on several key bills? Before him there was Nathan … uh Fletcher, the man of the center who lost a mayoral election to Bob Filner, the lefty who ran into his own libido, and Republican pornographers.
Nationally, how about that Allison Lundergran Grimes in Kentucky who shot off skeet guns at rifle ranges and swore she wasn’t an Obama partisan? Wasn’t she supposed to knock off Mitch McConnell, the still-breathing, who now readies himself to twist Democrats into various irrelevancies?
These people, Scott Peters (he’d be losing were it not for Carl’s Grab and Grin episodes), Nathan Fletcher (he lost), even Scott Brown (he lost!) look and sound like those news anchors, blameless, unimaginative, indifferent. If they were cars they’d be ’54 Dodge sedans, right turnlights blinking.
And… let’s face it, didn’t Obama already move way to the center-right back in 2008 with his inner committee of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner and their long fashionable austerity theories? What did he get for abandoning the New Deal? A deeply depressed negative approval rating of -19%, according to the latest Rasmussen poll.
A New Dealer might have figured out that our homeless population –demoralized and unable to survive in our digital/finance capital world — would be a hell of a lot better off if they could report to a new Works Projects Administration job dedicated to national parks preservation and recycling. Where were all these now-failed Democrats during the summer’s minimum wage struggles? Why is it they couldn’t find something that held promise for a better world, nation, state, county or city, something that could excite people?
As Lori Saldaña said at this site, the Wednesday after the debacle… “…we didn’t hear many candidates talking about the wage gap, or affordable higher ed for kids…” My wife is even more succinct; she says Demo politicians “are cowards.”
Has any Democratic candidate this election cycle demonstrated the courage of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders? And remember, these are people who won their Senate seats.
Politicians can’t win by boring people. Even less likely to win that way are Democratic Party politicians.
The Center is a political graveyard.
Bob Dorn
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Interesting in that all the people who voted in more Republicans also, when polled on the economy, were dissatisfied with and pessimistic about the financial circumstances and thought their kids would be worse off than they are. There’s a disconnect between voters’ attitudes about the economy and their own voting or is that all about the gerrymandering?
And to pile on to the irrelevance of the broadcast news, you can bet the farm that if not first, it’s the second item, some weather story of gyrating the adjectives/visuals of the worst, extreme high, low, never been measured, never seen since B.C. etc. as if weather report in Maine has significant relevance to 99% of the nation, but it’s surely fits the type meaningless visuals/sounds in current news reporting. Almost forgot, the reporter is required to stand in the middle of the weather scene.
I turn on the TV news (seldom) and see Meat with Eyes and an occasional Talking Goatee. They all look like “something you might put back in the shopping bag so you can get your money back… sort of rotten.”
And another thing…
ABC, CBS, and NBC are all acronyms, therefore correctly in ALL CAPS. Fox is NOT an acronym.
So, please don’t give those poseurs any added gravitas by capitalizing their name.
How come you don’t try writing something?
O, ye of short memory and unsupported allegation.
Mr. Dorn, you know nothing of me and what I have, or have not, written. And anyway, it has nothing at all to do with a simple correction and heartfelt request that comes from the same political stance as yours. Why do you feel the need to nasty?
(BTW, see http://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/09/why-team-sports-are-bad-for-society/#.VF5i8jTF_3c)
Look, minor errors seem to upset your little iconic devil, who apparently views others as an opportunity. You don’t have to change, but you ought to try writing more often, and it wouldn’t hurt to express your appreciation for work you agree with. Huh?
Yes, I do think that being correct is better than not. And, as an old journo, I think you oughta think so too, rather than being upset at simple suggestions of corrections.
Though I occasionally do it, I am not primarily a writer. You are. You are also on the editorial board of this fine website. That suggests a certain level of responsibility to me.
And, believe me, I express plenty of positives. Perhaps you just don’t see it.
Sorry, you’re just offering another correction. Let me try one on you: I’m not old.
And let me offer a correction to a correction: Bob Dorn is not on the editorial board of San Diego Free Press.
That’s old as in “some time ago; in the past; having had long practice”.
And sorry for maligning the SDFP editorial board ;-)