BILL MOYERS: Let's spend a moment on the Daschle affair before it becomes a footnote to history. The press zeroed in on the unpaid taxes. But was that really the heart of the story?
GLENN GREENWALD: I don't think it was the heart of the story at all. I think there was a much more significant aspect to Tom Daschle's nomination, which is that he spent 30 years in Congress, all of his adult life, in essence, doing nothing but being a member of Congress.
And the minute he left, he traded in on his influence and his contacts to make enormous sums of money by telling large corporations and wealthy individuals how they can get the legislation that they want from the Congress, including giving advice to the very companies and giving speeches to the very companies that he would have ended up regulating as part of his duties as Health and Human Services secretary.
It was, in short, a perfect illustration of the disconnect between America and Versailles.
BILL MOYERS: I think you wrote that "The media stars in Washington almost never understand that there's anything wrong with the establishment of which they're a part."
GLENN GREENWALD: That's right. I mean, if you were to say to normal Americans, and it's the reason why these issues resonated, and why Barack Obama made them a centerpiece of his campaign, that members of Congress leave office and make millions of dollars doing nothing other than essentially peddling influence to wealthy individuals who can have their way with Congress.
Most people consider that to be corruption. That's what Barack Obama called it when he ran. Yet, to members of the media, who have spent their lives in Washington, who are friends and colleagues of the people who are engorging themselves on this corrupt system that is just the way of life. It's like breathing air or drinking water. It's not anything that's noteworthy, let alone controversial.
Of course, it was neither noteworthy nor controversial to Obama, either-a fact worth keeping in mind as we proceed. To continue:
JAY ROSEN: Well, what doesn't get considered, Bill, is that there could be anything radically wrong with Washington. That the entire institution could be broken. That there are new rules necessary. That idea, that the institutions of Washington have failed and need to be changed, doesn't really occur to the press, because as Glenn said, they're one of those institutions. And they're one of the ones that failed.
Boy howdy! All those folks who still think Saddam had WMDs and was personally involved in 9/11? How'd they get those ideas? The media always corrects its mistakes, doesn't it? And makes a big deal about them, so that everyone knows about it, right? They are sooooo responsible.
BILL MOYERS: Your colleague at Salon.com, Joan Walsh, wrote this week, that Obama, "the great communicator," she called him, "seems to be losing control of the rhetoric of the spin." What do you think about that?
JAY ROSEN: I think his words have a power that perhaps he didn't understand. And one of the reasons why Daschle concluded that he had to go was that his own actions kind of undermine the spirit of Obama's own message. And that was certainly something he didn't expect. But in a way, it's good that we're holding him to his own words. That itself would be a radical change.
Because what the establishment expects is that people kind of say what they need to say to get elected. And then, once they're in power, kind of the old rules of Washington reassert themselves.
What Rosen says here is exactly right. But it's worth reflecting on where this comes from. What this immediately reminded me of was one of the most important political books of the early 2000s. Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie by Augustus B. Cochran III. In this book, Cochrane argues that the "Southernization" of American politics goes much deeper than the level of personnel that came to dominate the GOP in the 1990s. Rather, he argued that the US circa 2000 was very much like the South circa 1950 as analyzed by VO Key in Southern Politics in State and Nation. The institutions were different, but the functions surprisingly similar-like comparing gills and lungs.
For example, Cochrane argued that the Southern one-party system actually functioned more like a no-party system, depending on power structures outside the party. Similarly, Cochrane argued, the parties' declining power since the 1960s corresponded to the rise of individual political entrepreneurs, and many of the "show business" characteristics that had long typified Southern politics. Populist appeals were a not-infrequent part of this mix, one that invariably resulted in only the most superficial actions if they succeeded in securing election. This is precisely what Versailles now expects. And by making a large number of safe establishment choices, that looks like exactly what Obama was doing. Trying to actually pass a stimulus bill that works, however, does not go along with this set of explanations.
[Aside:It's also worth noting that Cochrane's analysis directly contradicts Obama's. The problem as Cochrane sees it is parties that are far too weak and formless, not ones that are too powerful and entrenched. Political freelancing of the sort that Obama epitomizes was the rule in most of the South as VO Key described it, and this utterly thwarted any sort of effort to create coherent policy initiatives beyond the level of simply doing the bidding of those in power.]
The interview continued:
BILL MOYERS: The Rasmussen Poll this week shows an eight point drop in support for the stimulus plan, what do you make of that?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I think if you go back to the 1990s, what you saw is essentially a partnership between the Republican Party, the right wing, and establishment media venues. And this partnership was formed when they were essentially engaged in their lynch mob over the Lewinsky affair.
And that partnership, those methods that were so successful then, translated into the media being blindly supportive and reverent of the Bush administration. And that partnership hasn't really gone anywhere. And so, I think that Obama, being somewhat new to Washington, and looking at Washington as this culture ready to be changed, and leave behind its old ways - that's what he really believes he can accomplish - may have been somewhat surprised by how potent that process is, when it works together.
And it suffocated his message. It attached the most dreaded label in Washington to what he was trying to do, which is conventional liberalism, that this is just a standard package of liberal economic policies: taxing and spending, and imposing burdens on the American taxpayer. And that message resonated with the media, and therefore, with the American public, and steamrolled the White House in a way that I think demonstrated they weren't really prepared for how vibrant that partnership remains.
JAY ROSEN: My sense, Bill, is that insofar as politics looks like it always has, Obama's ratings will go down. So if Washington is able to kind of ensnare him in its usual game, if the kind of partisan bickering or argument resumes, if Washington seems to be behaving the way it always has, Obama will lose. And it's easy for that to happen. It's the most likely thing. And that might be what happened this week.
Greenwald and Rosen both make potent points here that go to how Obama was not prepared to deal with Versailles' conservative hegemonic infrastructure. This is understandable at one level-but it's once again a level of extreme naivete which we're constantly warned is a terrible misreading of Obama. To wit: it's understandable if Obama took "bipartisanship" at face value, rather than as code for Democrats going along with Republicans, with varying degrees of rhetorical cover as required by circumstances. And, indeed, Obama has been cut an enormous amount of slack by Versailles during the campaign, because it was assumed (not without reason, given incidents like his FISA betrayal) that Obama was using "bipartisan" in the same way as the rest of Versailles. Much of his actions since winning election-such as the appointments of so many establishment hacks--further confirmed that Obama was reliably one of them, saying whatever he had to say to get elected.
Greenwald himself continues along this sort of a line:
GLENN GREENWALD: Let me just add to that, because I think it raises an interesting dilemma. Which is, if you look at what the media were saying about Obama favorably, both around the time of his election and subsequent as well, they kept insisting that he could continue Bush's counterterrorism policies that were so controversial.
They were praising him for leaving in place all sorts of Bush officials that the media wants to see is continuity, that he's not threatening to their way of life and to their establishment, for the reason that we talked about before. That's how he wins praise from them, is by showing that he isn't going to change things fundamentally, and therefore, isn't a threat to their system.
At the same time, as Jay said, what he needs to do more than anything to fulfill the commitments that he made, is demonstrate that he's a true change agent. And I think these objectives are very much in conflict, because the more he threatens the Washington system, I think the more hostility the press will feel towards him, and therefore, project to the public about him. And that, too, can undermine his political popularity.
This is the real nub of the issue, so far as Obama's entire presidency is concerned. He can please Versailles by not rocking the boat, and doing "bipartisanship" their way, which will almost certainly ensure that he's a failed one-term president. Or he can commit to fuilfilling his promise of change, and face the fiercest of battles with Versailles-far worse than Clinton, quite possibly, simply because the very economic future of the country is at stake.
Rosen adds a point about the individual reporter level motivations:
JAY ROSEN: If you're a career Washington reporter, how do you know that your knowledge is always going to be relevant throughout your career? Well, if politics is just an inside game, then you're always on top of it. If all of a sudden, a new dynamic enters it, you may not have the knowledge you need to be the expert, to be the authority. And I think there's a tendency for Washington journalists to see everything converging towards the political game that they are themselves masters of.
This recalls a 1996 book by James Fallows, Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Fallows was more institutional in his approach, but he cited a similar fundamental problematic motivation: if you have to cover unfamiliar things there is no telling what will happen. First off, fact-finding is expensive. Second, it can prove embarrassing. Third, it can even get you into trouble. It's much easier simply to cover politics as a kind of game, report what both sides say or do, and ignore the question of whether any of it is true or at all relevant to how people live their lives. Rosen's comment can be seen as an individualistic worms-eye-view of the same problem Fallows described in a more instutional and collective fashion. Nothing really has changed in over 12 years-other than the fact that the media culture Fallows described has done innumerable additional things to embarrass itself since then.
Fainally, skipping down quite a bit, Glenn describes things very succinctly:
GLENN GREENWALD: If you go back and look at the way in which Obama was praised for the last two months, almost entirely by the media, will almost always be based on this idea that he's not an ideologue that he's not in concert with the liberals and the leftists in his party. That's the great accomplishment in the eyes of the media; a president could possibly aspire to.
And the reason for that is because in their eyes, what liberalism or the leftist ideology that they're scorning, are not things about policy making per se, or even approaches to foreign policy. It's the idea that the prevailing consensus among our political elite is corrupted and needs to be radically changed. And so, what I think they are most afraid of is having the anger of the American people start to affect what happens within their system. What they want more than anything else, is to exclude those external influences.
That, in a nutshell, is the basic underlying dynamic. It's what's behind all the resistance to holding anyone in the Bush Administration accountable for anything, all the resistance to altering Bush military policies, all the resistance to altering any aspect of the "war on terror," all the resistance, really, to altering anything fundamental at all. And it's why I use the term "Versailles." What else do call a capital filled with contempt, hatred and disdain for the country that it rules over? |
