August 1, 2008

Big Macs for Barack II

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In general, I try to avoid writing about stupid campaign coverage because there is so much of it. The vast majority of it is, in fact, stupid on some level. Some of the responsibility for this falls on Maureen Dowd, whose habit of imbuing impressionistic trivia with cosmic political significance now dominates both media coverage and campaigning itself in various ways. But this is noteworthy: A literal example of Dowdism in action appears in today’s Wall Street Journal. Dowd has been obsessing for months about Barack Obama’s slender frame and apparent desire to maintain a healthy diet as somehow prissy and elitist, rather than what it is, which is: healthy, i.e., an objectively good quality in a person and a president. The WSJ takes the Dowd meme out of the realm of pure opinion and turns it into classic, pseudo-objective newspaper claptrap:

The candidate has been criticized by opponents for appearing elitist or out of touch with average Americans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in July shows Sen. Obama still lags behind Republican John McCain among white men and suburban women who say they can’t relate to his background or perceived values.

“He’s too new … and he needs to put some meat on his bones,” says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

“I won’t vote for any beanpole guy,” another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The article cites no evidence, in polling or history, that the skinny, fit candidate is at an electoral disadvantage to the chunkier candidate. (It notes that Lincoln was skinny and Taft was fat. Both won presidential elections.) The article’s notion that Americans are fat slobs who will reject a candidate who eats right and is fit is an elitist view in itself, and flat-out insulting to American voters. The quotes cited here negatively associate Obama’s physique with the true reasons for the quotees’ skepticism - his “newness” and the fact that he is not Hillary Clinton. In other words, it’s not his body mass index that really bothers them.

Why does the WSJ print this stuff? I’m not saying you can’t write about candidates’ diets or their body types - if it’s done with some wit. This isn’t. Via Kevin Drum.

 

July 17, 2008

Dowd’s next column

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Barack Obama is working out a lot. And not sweating.

 

July 16, 2008

Big Macs for Barack

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Not sure why I bother, but what is it about Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama, and food? Dowd has repeatedly mocked Obama’s “abstemious” tastes and how these set him apart from the great, fat, American mainstream:

July 16: He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about food…

July 13: He looked frustrated when Sasha revealed that “my dad doesn’t like sweets” and that he preferred “minty gum” to bubble gum. She then began singsonging “Everybody should like ice cream” before pointing a finger at the person who doesn’t: “Except Daddy!”

As Margaret Carlson told Mike Barnicle on “Hardball,” in a segment called “Is Obama Too Cool?,” about whether he relates to average Americans, sometimes you just want to tell the guy, “Eat the doughnut.”

Whether Obama was irritated that he had slipped up and exposed his daughters or was annoyed that his kids were exposing more delicious details about his finicky, abstemious tastes, we’ll never know.

May 21: “Oh, you’re so witty with all your stupid rallies with 75,000 people and spending $100 million on ads to promote one puny word: Change. I’ve made sacrifices in this campaign. While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.”

May 4: Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.

April 27: Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road…He dutifully enthused about carbs, assuring reporters that when he had dinner as a child with his Kansas grandparents, the food “would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana. A lot of pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

April 23: In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites.

April 2: At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

“Oh, now,” the woman managing the shop told him with a frown, “you don’t worry about calories in a chocolate factory.”

The Times’s Michael Powell reports that, after watching five plump, white-haired women in plastic hairnets spin the chocolate into such confections as “Phantom of the Opera” masks and pink high heels, he ventured: “Do you actually eat the chocolate or do you get sick of it?” They giggled at his silliness.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

Of course, this is all meaningless nonsense having nothing to do with what Obama might do as president, how he might do it, or even whom he might hire as White House chef. But even on its own terms - as an attempted insight into Obama’s alleged finickiness or his supposed distance from the Applebee’s set - it doesn’t make sense. A presidential candidate is apparently attempting to eat right while having a mix of fried road food and catered campaign meals shoved at him eight times a day. He should be hailed as a role model, not damned for failing to wolf down every last fry.

 

June 26, 2008

Karl, meet Maureen

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Say what you will about the chattering classes’ inane regard for the alleged genius of Karl Rove - it’s obvious now he was a disaster for the nation and for not one but two political parties. But the one thing he did know how to do was forge devastating political takedowns, attacks that were so audacious that they often worked, in spite of - and because of - their absurdity and unfairness. Josh Marshall dubbed this the bitch-slap theory of electoral politics: if your opponent is strong, you attack his strength even though it might look ridiculous, betting he’ll be too stunned to fight back. That way you look strong, he looks weak.

Now, however, Rove’s best shots against Obama appear to be Maureen Dowd-esque riffs on the candidate’s personality, which seem either made up and remote from ordinary experience - Obama with a beautiful date, smoking, at a country club? - or so unremarkable it’s surprising he managed to get them published at all: Obama, a guy running for president, is self-centered.

 

May 3, 2008

The political media freakshow: what went wrong?

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Here’s something I wrote on the HuffPo earlier this week:

With so much at stake — Iraq, the economy, global warming — how is it the presidential campaign descended into a parade of irrelevancies? The media know better. Is there is anyone working for a media organization (new, traditional, left, right) who genuinely believes that Jeremiah Wright’s views on HIV, race, or Israel would have any impact whatsoever on how Obama conducts himself as president?. The standard explanation is that “character concerns” of voters drive this type of coverage — but this isn’t an explanation as much as an excuse, as the polls show voters care a lot more about, well, issues with a direct impact on their lives.

Obama’s been the been getting this treatment lately, but they all get it sooner or later. Part of the problem, of course, is the never-ending Democratic race, which has created a maw that must constantly be fed on cable chat shows, which trade on character-driven morality plays for their ratings — celebrity crackups, missing white girls and sinister black guys. But obviously, the problem is bigger than that.

What went wrong?

I’ve been thinking about this for a piece I’ve written, not yet published. And it’s a strange convergence of trends. One of those trends is … Maureen Dowd. More than anyone else, Dowd legitimized “character” — not character, but a kind of flip shorthand for reading surfaces and political images that passes as insight into character. Twenty years ago, this was a great innovation — you could write impressionistically about campaigns! You could dig underneath the carefully-crafted image, revealing some truth beneath the hucksterism! I loved Dowd for this, and still do — but less and less these days. This technique — call it ripping off the mask — has become the alpha and omega of political journalism. It assumes the mask is a lie designed to mislead, and there is always going to be an embarrassing truth lurking underneath it.

MoDo came on the scene in the 1980s. In the 1990s, there was the rise of the right-wing media, with its culture-war obsessions. Fox, Drudge, Coulter et al took “character” journalism and gave it a brutal twist: No matter how dull Democratic candidates were (and, with the exception of Bill Clinton, man, were they dull), the politician’s bland mask came to obscure all the transgressions, real and imagined, of the 1960s.

This politics-as-innuendo approach generated great fodder for cable chat shows, generating high ratings and billions of page views — and, most important, lots of money. The mainstream media, meanwhile, was fumbling and adrift — willing to try anything to reclaim its cultural primacy, or at least its political savvy. So, to its shame, the MSM bought into this approach too.

I think most of the voting public isn’t paying much attention to all the current BS, and in a year with such big issues, and such stark differences between the two parties, the culture war stuff won’t ultimately swing things one way or another. But the media spin has simply become disengaged from reality. I wonder what it will take to get it back on track.