Thomas Byrne Edsall on the New York Times‘ Campaign Stops blog (7/23/12) accuses Barack Obama of “the politics of anything goes.” His evidence: The Obama campaign is running ads attempting to persuade voters not to vote for Mitt Romney.
The logic here is sort of hard to follow. First Edsall quotes Obama telling “those who are preparing to divide us” in 2008 that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” Then he points out that Obama’s 2012 campaign (like, undoubtedly, his 2008 campaign) identifies various demographic groups for messaging. I know, shocking.
And not only is Obama ’12 trying to reach various groups, the campaign is running “ads demonizing Romney” in order to “suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees.” And “not only whites without college degrees, but in particular white men without degrees, a constituency Obama has no hope of winning.”
Edsall, oddly enough, is accusing Obama of dividing America by aiming campaign messages even at “the most hostile segment of the electorate.” Apparently if he wanted to be a unifier, he would ignore those voters and leave them to Romney, to whom they naturally belong.
Note the implication that demographic groups are like states in the electoral college—winner take all—making it pointless to look for votes among groups you have “no hope of winning.” In reality, of course, convincing a million people to vote for you in a group that’s mostly opposed to you is the same as convincing a million more people to vote for you in a group that favors you.
Also implicit in Edsall’s line is that there is something underhanded about the ads Obama is running against Romney; they’re not just negative ads, they’re “demonizing” him. How so? Well, they go after Romney for his career at Bain Capital, which at times involved firing workers and moving jobs overseas. For corporate media, this is crossing a dangerous line—criticizing a capitalist for doing what capitalists do.
The word “suppress” is key to Edsall’s argument, and he returns to it repeatedly:
- “Vote suppression is important for Obama because his numbers among whites without degrees are worsening, despite the omnipresence of anti-Romney ads in the battleground states.”
- “Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.”
- “The importance of vote suppression in a close contest can be seen in the following hypothetical [involving making up numbers to illustrate a simple premise to make it look like you’re doing political science].”
Now, “voter suppression” has a specific meaning in political discussions, and it doesn’t mean negative advertising: It refers to dirty tricks and discriminatory electoral laws that keep people who want to vote from voting. (See Ed Kilgore and Steve Benen on the critical distinction Edsall glosses over.) When voters are suppressed, they’re disenfranchised; when a campaign convinces a voter not to vote for the other guy, that’s democracy in action.
As Edsall notes, the Republicans are at this very moment busily engaged in actual voter suppression:
Over the past two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been conducting an aggressive vote-suppression strategy of their own through the passage of voter identification laws and laws imposing harsh restrictions on voter registration drives.
But in Edsall’s framing, Republicans are just involved in the same kind of “anything goes” politics as Obama. Edsall’s reference to the GOP strategy serves to justify voter disenfranchisement than to criticize it, thanks to the magic of false equivalence.
I guess you could call this an example of “anything goes” punditry.
Meanwhile, Romney’s only too happy to court “birthers”, Islamophobes and anticom-yu-nists … tars which his campaign avoids, but which his surrogates either implicitly or explicity employ.
And stating the bleeding obvious, it speaks volumes about politics in these here United States when “socialist” is an epithet, and used primarily to demonize those who couldn’t be reasonably labeled as such in even a Euro party context.
Dear Misleader falls somewhere to the right of Tricky Dick on many policies. He represents unity in the sense that his presidency has continued the constriction of the acceptable political spectrum in this country, bringing both major parties even closer together ideologically.
Not that there was ever a yawning gap to begin with.
Trans-Pacific Partnership, anyone?
Obama’s new job http://ow.ly/ctKHe
Dear Misleader heads the corpress gummint, wouldn’t you say?
Excellent analysis, Jim. On a personal level, I get SO sick & tired of having to encounter Fox News (it’s on in the lunch-room at work… by popular in-house vote, no less) hyper-ventilating about this or that supposed transgression against some poor millionaire or Tea-Partier and how it’s anti-democratic and un-constitutional, and yet virtually the same right-wing element is pushing those new voter-discouragement laws. Of course they claim that it’s to prevent voter fraud, but here in Wisconsin the REPUBLICAN attorney general had investigated voter fraud several years ago and could only come up with something like 7 or 8 confirmed cases out of approx 3,000,000 votes… but their ‘solution’ to this non-existent problem (special ID requirements) was going to have the happy side-effect of discouraging approx 100,000 voters, most of them low-income/poor elderly voters who would greatly favor Democrats. This has shades of the old Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and other Southern suppression laws previously aimed at blacks.
This is again the black/white of the Uber-richt ingsoc party. Notice that the Romney always says the exact opposite of whatever is said of him, if someone says he sent jobs overseas, then he will claim that it is really Obama.
He wasn’t kidding when he said he is going to be Bush on steroids; he is now. Bush used to do the same thing with Clinton; recall it was his platform to ‘reverse everything Clinton did’. What is Romney claiming he will do? “Reverse everything Obama did”. There is no difference in that. Sadly the democrats have not really learned that the same ol same ol, is getting tiring.
First, he’s making nothing close to the point you’re making. He’s holding someone in power to his own standards. By Obama’s logic, if the nation is truly made up of in-divid-uals, then he has no need to target me, or as the columnist accurately writes “single out.” You have this story totally backwards from the get-go.
Second, you should realize “frames” and curious ironies are propaganda concepts intended to keep you singing the same old tune without the enemy’s bitter interference. A frame is, according to the guru George Lakoff, any word. So just think about that for a second. If any word is your little battleground that’s all it takes for a little post-modern change of subject, to then conclude with a coy personal attack on an enemy’s reputation and not his copy editor where it belongs. So it’s a little facetous to even claim corporate media is the problem, when the very instinct prompting this article is partisan tribalism.
Third, these are millionaires spending millions on videos designed to get me to not focus on them, and one of them is in charge of the country. How about complaining about the fascism, sorry, corporate media Republican, as you call it, inherent in that?
It’s up to FAIR to decide whether this is “action alert”-worthy, but the Times using the words “vote suppression” and “suppress turnout” to describe normal campaign tactics designed to dampen enthusiasm among the opponent’s base seems to me to be beyond the pale.
I wonder whether avoiding the specific phrase “voter suppression” was deliberate. If so, that really just makes it worse, since it implies a level of purposeful obfuscation by the reporter.
I would be far from surprised if I learned that injecting this phraseology in this context is in fact a project by the Republican side to muddy the waters around reporting of their actual voter suppression agenda. Perhaps in Edsall they found a pliable, “objective” reporter to help out.
Politics has always been a blood sport.Obama has every right to attack every inch of Mitts background record.Especially as it pertains to his qualification for the job.My anger with him is that while that goes on in every election, it takes a back seat to trumpeting your own record.He must stand or fall on the job he has done,and his ideas for the future.So far I have heard little of either.His attitude stripped of the glitz seems to be…I suck ,but I can convince you he may suck worse!
Lewis, what in God’s name are you talking about? And m.e., you apparently know nothing about Presidential politics. Don’t stop talking, though–it’s your right to not know, and then carry on about it.
Isn’t it clear by now that the Republican M.O. is to watch the left’s response to what they themselves do, then take that language and use it against the left in an effort to confuse the argument and defang the complaint. For example, the left has legitimate, verifiable complaints about the right’s attempt to suppress votes, so the right co-opts that language by using it to mean something entirely different, rendering “voter suppression” a vague and toothless idea. The left has long complained that the right “demonizes” whoever they do not agree with (and they have consistently with Obama), suddenly that language pops up in the right’s complaint about attacks on Mitt in instances where he’s not being “demonized” but his activities being accurately described. It’s exactly that kind of thinking/tactic that allowed Kerry’s military strength to be used against him in those “Swift Boat” ads. Which also, by the way, has lost all meaning. “Swift Boating”, a very specific term, is now used simply to mean “anything negative”. These linguistic political tactics work time and again and are older than Karl Rove. Or maybe Lee Atwater…
Another article in FAIR that doesn’t make sense. When running for reelection to keep your job, you do whatever in necessary to win. In the case of repubs you just tell all sorts of lies. If telling people not to vote for Mitt works, he had BETTER do it. Why tie his own hands behind his back when the repubs try to win by any means necessary, by hook or crook.
Thomas Edsall has written a lot of idiotic articles in the Times, and doesn’t provide a link on his webpage to email him, either. He’s sort of a hit and run journalist.
Make sure your non-Mormon friends Google: “Banned Mormon Cartoon.”
Mormons believe they will become Gods.
This guy Edsall needs to be roasted over a low flame for so cynically twisting the meanings of words describing classic Republican attacks against liberal voters. As with the entire Corporate Conservative Media, they try to paint being a liberal as “villainous”, when it’s a perfectly valid, and entirely human impulse to believe in.
Now, Obama is no liberal; and the fact that this Edsall guy would turn attacks usually saved for the liberals he despises onto a fellow conservative is proof that the Right is poisoning the political discourse, dragging it into gutter politics that does nothing but present to people the image that no one is worth voting for (as true as that may be these days).
Then again, I never understood how any American could ever think that a nation with a vast majority of middle class people could be best represented by a government of millionaires. America needs to invoke Campaign Reform; give each candidate $500,000 and they are allowed to spend no more and no less than that on their campaign, evening the bar for Middle Class candidates. Outlaw corporate or private political ads, and enforce Truth in Advertising Laws on political ads — if someone hasn’t actually done something, you can’t say that he has.
Or do Americans want the Neo-Nobles of America ruling them like Kings and Queens forever. Didn’t America once hold a revolution over exactly this kind of situation once?
McBob: You couldn’t have said it any better! When an organization filled with educated intelligent compassionate individuals such as FAIR spends it’s time and energy defending one corrupt candidate against the other, it validates and further perpetuates the current broken system which is headed straight for corporate neo-fascism. If an alien landed in the US from another planet and read and listened to FAIR’s numerous blogs and segments defending Obama against Romney it would think that Obama (and the DP by inference) are models of virtue and defenders of human rights.
Wow, Freespirit, you completely, utterly missed the point of the post. FAIR is pointing out hypocrisies on the part of some rockhead reporter or media type who’s making preposterous claims about what the President is or is not doing during the run-up to an election. Last week, Mr. Romney, many right-wingers, and members of the press deliberately mis-quoted the President to make it look like he hated business owners. Then, using false-equivalency, they dismissed the complaints about the lying and mis-quoting with the old tried and true “both sides are doing it.” But, overwhelmingly, the Right is doing it far more often–almost exclusively. That’s just a fact. It’s just a plain and terrible fact that the Republicans and the Right have gone completely off the rails in virtually every way possible. That’s not “defending Obama against Romney.” More on this later, and by next week we’ll see how the Harry Reid unsourced comments play out. Reid claims that someone told him (someone who would know) that Romney didin’t pay any tax for a few years.
Freespirit, just because FAIR points out the fallacies in the news media that implicitly or explicitly fault Obama and/or support Romney doesn’t mean that they support everything about Obama, or would never (via media criticism) criticize him or his administration. I dislike a lot of things about Obama; did in 2008 too. But I’m a grown-up — therefore I realize that I have to support and vote for the person who comes the closest to what I believe we need in a president. Romney and Obama are both corporate-supported, but Obama is less so, and Obama won’t appoint extremists like Roberts and Scalia to the Supreme Court, and O. will at least TRY to fix our health-care system, and O. will try to fix the deficit by attempting to let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, and O. will try to prevent Republicans from owning women’s bodies, etc., etc. People who hated both Bush and Gore, and then both Bush and Kerry, and either voted for a third party or didn’t, out of disgust, vote at all, are responsible for the current extreme-right make-up of the Supreme Court, and responsible for many other atrocities perpetrated by the Bush administration. If people like you who hate both Obama and Romney do the same thing with their votes, we will be subjected to even further fascism when Romney wins. We need to be grown-ups and vote for the person who is the closest to what we want, even if s/he is imperfect.
As I’ve said here before, FAIR does occasionally criticize Democrats but the frequency of it pales in contast to its defense and apology. When the two parties are almost identical (except in rhetoric), you would think that FAIR would point out a lot more wrongdoings on the part of the Democrats than it does.
Also, if being grown-up means I have to vote for a war-criminal, then I refuse to grow up!
To counter this neoliberal power trip, I only object to tribal ritual, not logic. Sorry for the big words. Countering is showing where the logic breaks down. Neoliberal is a concealed hatred for democratic principles. A tribal ritual is something a tribe does to recognize its own power and relationship to the world. So Naureckas was trying to find his relationship to the world, and I’m showing that this logic breaks down because it is inconsistent with democratic principles.
I know it’s hard to understand my point from the neoliberal mindset. I’ll say it simple and plain. We all have a tribal instinct. Why do you believe something someone told you he heard from someone, but demand Republicans prove everything they say? I think it really comes down to this: is democracy based on “passions and interests” of people, or ideas? If you believe the first, you’re necessarily in Obama’s philosophy camp. That doesn’t mean that reason goes out the window either, it’s just put in the service of passions and interests, not ideas (Republicans don’t fight fair, mommy!).
To be fair (pun intended) one at least acknowledges the argument of the other side. I felt no need to remind you of what you just read, but then again, I probably should have at least said, yes Republicans play word games. So I’m doing it too. The tribal ritual doesn’t allow one to even perceive, let alone figure out one’s limits. That is why I’m trying to put a stop to it from dominating what is considered rational and necessary critique, and there is evidently a reason to do it. The effect of the tribal dance we are commenting on now is a change of subject to Democrats vs Republicans, or FAIR vs Republicans, not Obama’s ideals.
You must sense I’m not following the ritual, the dance, the script. What is the Right? What is the Left? These are tribal identities, not principles, and that’s why it sounds like I’m speaking Chinese.
Oh my gosh! This is so terrible! No one would ever get elected if they did not talk to many different groups and try to make an argument. “Suppression” has a technbical meaning and the usage of it here is offensive, equating a political argument not to vote for the other guy (negative advertising) with dirty tricks keeping the other guy’s supporters from getting out to the polls.
Voter suppression? Negative attack ads?
Classic GOP strategy: accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty. It is the height of hypocrisy.
Edsall is an idiot.
Lewis, I totally get what you’re trying to say. Most people on the so-called left are co-dependent. They are always focusing on and reacting to the actions of “the other” which they have defined as the Republicans. It doesn’t take Freud to tell us that when we focus on “the other” we are constantly on the defensive and lose sight of our own goals.
Also, the Democrats on the left engage in partisan tribalism which makes them vulnerable to sacrificing the very values and principles that place them on the so-called left. They tolerate ever increasing atrocities committed by the Democratic leaders. This is why Obama gets away with turbo-charging the very things that during Bush would have brought thousands to the streets.
I propose that people who are capable of compassion (which includes most people on the so-called left) to stop engaging in tribalism on any sort and simply work towards unabashed and uncompromising promotion of compassionate values.
democrats, republicans, the liberal media, i’m just so happy that i can see through all of it!
Hey Doug Latimer,
Don’t knock socialism. It pays your banker’s salary!
Andy, are you certain you suss my meaning?
Bottom line – vote Democratic. I’m really fed up with the Republicans and their trying to bamboozle Americans into believing they are the good guys when they are anything but. Romney is a dangerous man. Why? Because he believes that the rich should rule the poor, ignorant underclasses and any foreign entity who, clearly, should never be allowed to have any say. Just listen and watch and you can see it very clearly.
Elizabeth
And the Dems believe the government should rule….EVERYONE!Yours is nothing more than an opinion,based on hyperbole.Mine is fact.They(the Dems) move everyday to legislate a Fed that controls more and more.People that are rich and poor will rise and fall within a free market .Look at Bill Clinton.Go back in time.In your eyes a poor Arkansas man ,who will likely never amount to anything.In my eyes a man who can achieve anything his heart desires.Who was right?But the fed so empowered will never relinquish power or station .Our founders new this.