Dana Milbank doesn’t want to have to cover trivial issues like Rick Santorum’s sweaters or the Iraq War. (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
Poor Dana Milbank. Here it is just the beginning of 2015, and the Washington Post columnist (1/16/15) is already tired of covering the 2016 presidential campaign.
“This isn’t an election–it’s a rerun,” he complains. He’s talking about all the people that are running or might be running who have run before or have relatives who have run.
And this makes Milbank mopey, because “their presence in the race virtually guarantees we’ll be revisiting….”
Let me interrupt him there, because I want to lay out in bullet form Milbank’s list of pointless things he will have to cover but doesn’t want to:
- Whitewater
- Monica Lewinsky
- The Iraq War
- Torture
- Rafalca the dancing dressage horse
- Poor Seamus strapped to a car roof
- Huckabee’s guitar and waistline
- Santorum’s sweaters
To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, some of these things are not like the others.
The Iraq War, to take the most glaring example, has killed about half a million people so far, and it’s not over; the US continues to bomb the same Sunni insurgents it’s been fighting since 2003. We really ought to be discussing this with the candidates to be the next president even if none of them happen to be named Bush.
Likewise, the United States under George W. Bush subjected thousands of people to torture, internationally recognized as a war crime and a crime against humanity, and the Obama administration has failed to prosecute anyone for ordering it or carrying it out. Milbank may be underestimating US media’s ability to ignore serious issues that neither major party particularly wants to talk about, but it’s grotesque to compare the systematic brutalizing of human beings to ugly sweaters or bad musical taste.
Leaving aside the two real issues that Milbank probably won’t spend much time on anyway, why does he have to talk about any of the rest of it? Is there really a journalistic rule that says you have to cover a candidate’s spouse’s 20-year-old extramarital affair? Or 35-year-old failed real estate developments? If the press corps wants to spend time discussing the Romney family pets, that’s the press’s decision and no one else’s.
Milbank blames his boredom on “the dominance of name recognition over everything else in politics.” This, he says, is “why Al Franken is in the Senate and why reality TV star Sean Duffy is in the House.” Franken was a minor player on Saturday Night Live 20 years ago, leaving the show some 13 years before he was elected senator; if he hadn’t built up a second career as a political commentator after his TV days, his name now would be a tough trivia challenge. And “reality TV star Sean Duffy” is not good evidence of the importance of name recognition to anything.
“In the absence of ideas and popular passion–the sort of spirit that briefly captured the nation’s imagination in 2008–winning becomes about name recognition and celebrity,” Milbank moans. Of course, there are politicians today with ideas–but you won’t find a name like Elizabeth Warren in this column. That’s more “popular passion” than Milbank has the stomach for.
