Spanking The Chairman

Paul Waldman
June 14, 2005


Paul Waldman is a senior fellow with Media Matters for America and a senior contributor to The Gadflyer.


Chairman Dean, it’s time for your spanking. Let’s let David Broder, the walking embodiment of the conventional wisdom, do the honors. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Broder scolded Dean: “By focusing so much on himself, Howard Dean as a spokesman for the Democratic Party has really done a disservice to the party.” He later returned to the point: “By focusing so much on his own comments rather than looking for a way to give the party a policy voice, he’s really done them a disservice.” Which is sort of like me punching you in the nose, then saying, “What you need to do is stop focusing so much on your nose.”

And so it goes for Howard Dean. When Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dean recently, he asked five questions critical of comments Dean had made, then posited that the Democrats have been “spectacularly unsuccessful in recent elections…doing very, very badly,” then to close the interview asked four more questions about statements Dean had made. Frustrated with Dean’s attempts to discuss—get this—policy issues, Blitzer at one point said, “One other quote you made that's been—you've been asked about this—you don't have to respond, but I'll just read it.” That’s what passes for journalism on cable news these days.

This isn’t to say that Dean bears no responsibility for what get characterized as his “missteps.” But the fact that his every utterance is now studied with Talmudic attention for anything that can be deemed impolite or impolitic highlights Dean's nearly intractable problem with the press. The Washington journalistic establishment just doesn’t like Howard Dean. He’s rough around the edges, and he doesn’t play by the rules, especially the rule casting Democrats as perennially weak and apologetic . And reporters didn’t have to look too hard to find Democrats who would go on record about their displeasure with Dean.

Democratic politicians sometimes seem so ignorant about how the news media work, one wonders how they ever got elected in the first place. Here’s a tip: If you want reporters to write about all the things the Bush administration is doing wrong, don’t criticize your party chair to them. Lots of Washington Democrats don’t like Dean much either, but there are plenty of people to whom they can air their complaints—their staffs, their colleagues, their spouses, their dogs. Heck, they can walk over to DNC headquarters and wring his neck if they like. But when they criticize him to reporters, that enables those reporters to write one of their favorite stories, “Democrats are squabbling again.”

If the politicians didn’t give those quotes, they wouldn’t be able to write those stories. Then they’d have to focus on something more advantageous to Democrats, like Bush’s failure on Iraq, or his failure on Social Security or his failure on the economy. Think back to the 2002 congressional campaign. Republican Congressman Tom Davis accused Senator Tom Daschle of “giving aid and comfort to our enemies”—that’s the definition of treason—when Daschle pointed out that Osama bin Laden was still at large. Because Democrats preferred a version of the bill establishing the Homeland Security department that didn’t attack labor unions, President Bush said they were “not interested in the security of the American people.” Did any Republicans distance themselves from these remarks or offer sniveling apologies? Of course not. As a result of episodes like these, reporters have come to expect and accept a greater level of viciousness from Republicans than they do from Democrats.

When a Democrat begins to get tough, you can be sure other Democrats will head for the cameras to assure everyone that he doesn’t speak for them. Listen to how pundits are offering scolding tutorials to Dean on what he and the Democrats should do, and you’d think that they believed they picked the wrong career. Just as every actor really wants to direct, every pundit really wants to be a political consultant. Just as they instructed John Kerry that, in Andrea Mitchell’s words, “He’s got to talk in sound bites,” now they are telling Dean to keep his mouth shut.

One person who will never receive that instruction is RNC chair Ken Mehlman, whose robotic message discipline ensures that a controversial word will never pass his lips. You might think that a character like Mehlman, who in public offers the basest form of political rhetoric imaginable—an endless string of simplistic talking points and Bizarro World paeans to our smashing success in Iraq, the booming economy and public excitement about Bush’s Social Security plan—would receive withering contempt from the Fourth Estate. But you’d be wrong. No, Mehlman is praised to the heavens precisely because of the unceasing tornado of spin he spits out.

There are few things reporters respect more than a politician or operative who stays fanatically on message. Repeat the same talking points over and over, and the press will dutifully pass on what you say without making any judgments about what kind of person you are. Everyone now agrees that Howard Dean needs to be careful about what he says. But there may be no way for him to win. Consider the last of Dean’s recent “controversial” comments, his statement that the GOP is “pretty much a white Christian party.” In other shocking news, the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. According to the 2004 exit polls, 87 percent of Bush voters were white and 89 percent were Christian (by comparison, Kerry voters were 66 percent white and 71percent Christian). If as mundane an observation as that can be twisted into the question, “Does Howard Dean hate white Christians?” (as Fox News did), no amount of care on Dean’s part will stop Republicans and the press from turning what he says into a “controversy.”

Because he came to the job as a public personality in a way his predecessors were not, Dean is subject to a standard no other party chair has ever had to labor under (when then-RNC chair Rich Bond said in 1992, “We are America. Those other people are not America,” no one much cared). As CNN’s Candy Crowley said about the recent Dean flap, “This is one of those stories we will not let go easily.” You bet they won’t.

So Democrats might consider taking a page from the Republican playbook. Think of the dozens of direct, provable lies the administration told about Iraq during the run-up to the war. How many of them actually generated critical coverage? Just one: Bush’s State of the Union claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Why? Because the administration admitted its error. When that blood was in the water, reporters felt they had permission to become more openly critical and describe the claim as false.

The lesson is that the press rewards you for sticking to your guns. In private, reporters may have issues with many of the Bush administration’s policies, but they have only the greatest respect for the Bushies’ persistence and ruthlessness.

When Howard Dean throws a punch at the GOP, Republicans tend to act like wounded children, crying “Mom! He’s making fun of me!” to the press. Democrats, never missing an opportunity to look simultaneously weak and opportunistic, respond with backtracking and apologies. And so far, this strategy has not exactly been what even political consultants would call effective.