The New York Times illustrated Peter Wehner’s piece with a stretched-out donkey. A load of bull would have been more appropriate. (graphic: Matt Chase)
“Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?” asks a New York Times op-ed (5/27/15). Because this question is always answered affirmatively by corporate media, you don’t even have to note that the author, Peter Wehner, “served in the last three Republican administrations” to know that the answer is going to be yes.
Despite the predictable thesis, however, the column still manages to surprise with its degree of intellectual dishonesty. Wehner’s thesis is that Barack Obama has “moved to the left” compared to “centrist New Democrat” Bill Clinton. But whenever Wehner makes a claim that can be checked—that isn’t simply empty rhetoric, like his assertion that Obama “has often acted as if American strength is a problem”—again and again it turns out to involve some numbers game.
Take Wehner’s claim that while Clinton
endorsed a sentencing policy of “three strikes and you’re out,”…Obama’s former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., criticized what he called “widespread incarceration” and championed the first decrease in the federal prison population in more than three decades.
You’d never know from that that the federal prison population is 48 percent bigger under the “left” Obama than it was when centrist Clinton left office.
“Mr. Clinton lowered the capital-gains tax rate; Mr. Obama has proposed raising it,” Wehner says. Clinton lowered the rate capital gains were taxed at to 20 percent; under Obama it went up—to 20 percent.
“Mr. Clinton cut spending and produced a surplus,” writes Wehner. “Under Mr. Obama, spending and the deficit reached record levels.” From 1993 through 2000, Clinton reduced the US budget imbalance as a proportion of US GDP by 6 percentage points; from 2009 through 2014, Obama reduced it by 7 percentage points.
Wehner adds as “another bellwether” the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton “is decidedly more liberal than she and her husband once were.” One example of this: “She has remained noncommittal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that has drawn ire from the left”—but which has been strenuously pushed by Barack Obama, though Wehner does not acknowledge this as evidence of Obama’s centrism.
But perhaps the most deceptive part of Wehner’s op-ed is when he blames Obama’s supposed shift to the left for the failing fortunes of the Democratic Party:
After two enormous losses by Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, Republicans control the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are currently 31 Republican governors compared with 18 for Democrats…. The Obama years have been politically good for Mr. Obama; they have been disastrous for his party.
Surely Wehner remembers that after the first half of Clinton’s first term, Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate for the remainder of his administration—exactly as happened under Obama. There were 30 Democratic governors when Clinton took office, and 19 when he left; there were 29 when Obama took office, and currently there’s 18.
It’s true that Obama has been been bad news for his party—but as FAIR has long pointed out, that’s true of Clinton as well. An honest appraisal of the administrations of both Clinton and Obama, with their emphasis on deficit-cutting and corporate-friendly trade deals, reveals both Democrats to be establishment centrists—and centrist politics, contrary to what the punditocracy would have you believe, do not have a particularly winning record at the ballot box.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
I for one find it extremely repulsive for the New York Times to be publishing opinion pieces in support of the latter-day Republican Party. This one, by a Republican Party hack, contains little more than distortions, and it’s premise, that Democrats have “pulled too far left,” is obviously and completely absurd.
Can there be any justification whatever for the governmental dysfunction that Republicans in the U.S. Congress have caused?
Really? With how extreme to the right the republican party has been going? I mean, I guess, if you judge motion as relative to the republican party, sure, they are moving to the left.
And I hate this moral equivalence implied by right vs. left as if the correct position is somewhere in between (the narrow scope of) Republicans and Democrats… Fuck that. Fuck both of them too.
Bill Clinton left his party in shambles at the end of his presidency. Al Gore had to work very hard to distance himself from his boss.
Right now people remember Clinton fondly because he was in the office during the up cycle in the economy, but his only achievements are conservative ones. He reduced welfare, expanded free trade and increased incarceration rate. Everything that he has achieved his wife is now trying to distance herself from.
We should call it “red shifting”; the Republicans are heading to right at light speed, while the original Center-left has stayed put; ergo the spectrum has shifted into the Red overall even though they only people moving more right are the clueless folks like NYT. IF they keep this we dare not bend over on the left or we will find them Repub’s lapping us from the left, from behind.
Two words: Bernie Sanders.
NYT must be sucking on the same lobbyists teet of the financial sector that Congress is to promote its sales & propaganda. >>>>>> http://is.gd/sHNgH6
You call yourselves “Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting” and then proceed in this article to berate the NYT for publishing an Op-Ed piece by a known Republican as if it was a NYT editorial, or somehow reflects the point of view of the NYT itself.
I believe the NYT does a great service by periodically publishing the outlandish opinions of GOP apologists so that its readers can see for themselves just how crazy these people are. There might have been a bit more fairness and accuracy if you had included the fact that this Wehner op-ed piece generated over 1400 comments from NYT readers, of which about 99% tore the writer and his ludicrous opinion to shreds. The NYT is not clueless and has nothing to apologise for; I’m not so sure about FAIR after this apparent misrepresentation.
@ Peter: Your main point is well-taken; publishing the outlandish opinions of latter-day GOP apologists is indeed a service to the public.
The NYT, however, continues to publish its own far-right columnists who support the GOP without facing the issues, such as David Brooks, and it deletes blog comments critical of the newspaper for doing so.
The Times editorial board is unwilling to face the fact that Republican partisans on the Supreme Court and in the Congress have destroyed the American democracy.
A number of well-written websites, however, deal with this new reality, and FAIR is primary among them.
And the Right continues to call the NYT “liberal media”. I don’t believe they would recognize a liberal if one came to their house to take their guns.