Getting To Know John Kerry
The press has hijacked the election - again.
by Russell M. Drake
09/10/04 "ICH" -- In a replay of the 2000 heist which gave Bush a free pass to the White House, the national press has shoved the candidates aside and taken over the debate process. Instead of robust arguments by the candidates throughout the campaign year, voters again will have to get by with only three debates, crammed into two weeks at the end of the year.
The press meanwhile, continues in its yearlong role as surrogate debater.
The effect is to hurt Kerry and help Bush by enabling Bush to fashion attacks such as Swift Boat and other time consuming distractions that protect him from direct confrontation with Kerry. Bush aims to win by not showing up, a default tactic usually associated with losers.
When John Kerry announced in mid-March that he wanted face to face monthly debates with Bush, barely muffled snickers of derision rippled through America’s press rooms, a reminder of the disdain with which they treated Al Gore’s fruitless call for monthly debates with Bush in 2000, nicknamed "Debate Duck."
Confronting the press in the Rose Garden, it is hard to tell from his expression what is in Bush’s mind. Is it amused contempt that they are such easy marks, or gratitude that they are so helpful to his cause?
He knows his hypnosis trumps their facts, objectivity, balance, and fairness, to say nothing of their reason, logic, and analysis. As late as April, 57 percent of Americans still believed the Bush line that Saddam had WMD and helped terrorists bring down the twin towers, according to a University of Maryland poll (www.pipa.org). A June, ABC-Washington Post poll found that "Most Americans continue to suspect that Iraq, under Saddam, did provide support to the al Qaeda terrorist network..." Even though the 9/11 Commission found these fears baseless, and Bush himself has since disavowed some of it, a solid residue remains emotionally imbedded in the collective subconscious mind, impervious to reason or fact, where Bush can summon it as needed to aid his campaign.
Pointing at reporters and calling them by their first names as if they are generals in his army, Bush fields the soft, deferential questioning with the scorn it deserves, answers some questions, ignores others, then shows them the commander-in-chief backside as he marches back into the White House, mission accomplished, another day escorted safely past the dangerous shoals of a direct encounter with John Kerry.
The last politician to affect such disdain for writers may have been Adolf Hitler, who said in the preface to Mein Kampf, "I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers."
Bush may never win awards for oratory but he gets high marks for his work with a complex skein of political hypnosis that includes fear hypnosis, deference hypnosis, and verbal confusion hypnosis, none of it likely to be broken by a one-on-one showdown with his challenger.
Press Hypnosis
The power hypnosis tool that Bush wields most effectively is the press. The press gives him leverage in everything, even as it professes to objectively critique his actions, as demonstrated at his April 13 primetime White House "press conference" which he opened with a 15-minute campaign commercial, then stonewalled most reporters’ questions afterwards.
The press is his national advertising and PR agency.
As he is the focal point of power in the country, the press dotes on his every move, no matter how inconsequential. He kisses a baby, it’s page-one. A woman volleyball player kisses him, it’s all over the tube. By contrast, the press has marginalized Kerry most of the year. He has to fall off his water skis or dress like a biker to get ink and then most often endure the crumbs of such wretched exposure in the back pages, especially when Bush is presidentially allocating federal disaster funds to hurricane devastated Floridians, for example.
Even as the press keeps Kerry’s candidacy under wraps, it has the barefaced audacity to complain, "the American people still don’t know much about Kerry," and "he needs to clearly define himself to voters."
The News Hour’s Jim Lehrer may have summed it up for his colleagues when, during the Democratic National Convention, he wondered aloud to Walter Mondale, "Why have they (the public) not connected with him (Kerry) thus far?"
Mondale’s response was a message to the Kerry camp: "Well, I think he has connected, but not enough......I think that he’s a very able and smart man. And I think he tends to talk in theoretical structures that make sense, means a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily connect with the voters. I think he has to find a way to say the same thing through examples that people can follow and feel good about." Translation: Not an electrifying speaker, needs to let his hair down, work on his delivery. More recently, Kerry appears to have been energized by the Swift Boat accusations and since the Republican nominating convention has been challenging Bush with new vigor.
Clearly, Kerry is uncomfortable with speechifying and would like the press to stand aside so he can confront his opponent directly. Bush needn’t worry. He knows his press.
Bush was still playing "Debate Duck" with Al Gore as recently as August 8, 2003, when he declined to respond to a blistering critique of his presidency at New York University where the former vice president said, "The very idea of self government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth....The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process..."
Asked by a pool reporter at his Texas ranch to say something about Gore’s comments, Bush snorted "Politics," turned on his heel and stalked away. End of debate.
"Debate Duck"
Al Gore’s widely ignored call for debates with Bush in the 2000 election came to be known as "Debate Duck," to describe Bush’s media-aided avoidance of anything resembling a debate until the final month before the election when Bush agreed to three carefully scripted and forgettable debates hosted by PBS’ Lehrer.
(The same format will prevail this year under the auspices of the Commission for Presidential Debates, with three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate occurring in late September and the first two weeks of October. CPD, since 1988 the self styled "non-partisan" producer of the presidential debates, was the focus of a judicial order August 12 which found that the Federal Election Commission had "ignored" evidence and acted "contrary to law" in erroneously ruling that CPD was non-partisan. Co-chaired by a Republican and a Democrat, CPD blocked third-party presidential candidates from participating in the 2000 debates and used "face books" to identify the candidates and keep them out of the debate halls. In a 19-page opinion, a federal district judge in Washington, D. C. ordered FEC to review its ruling "consistent with the court’s opinion." This potentially far reaching decision could eventually mandate inclusion of candidates such as Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan in future presidential debates. Nader and Buchanan were among minority party candidates who brought the legal action. The press’ response to this breakthrough decision was to treat it as a throwaway one-liner buried in the back pages.
By telephone from his Washington headquarters, Nader for President press spokesman Kevin Zeese accused the national press of "complicity" in disseminating views of the major parties and suppressing third party participation in the political process.
"The media in this country is pretty lousy," said Zeese.
Gore tried desperately throughout 2000 to lure Bush into give-and-take open debates, to draw him out on the issues, where his
war-likeness, wacko economics, and underhanded privatization schemes might have been laid bare for all to see. Bush responded that there would be "plenty of time for debates" later in the campaign, a remark that went unchallenged by the press.
When approached about the desirability of Bush-Gore debates during the 2000 campaign year, historian and TV talk show panelist Doris Kearns Goodwin opined that debates would be "boring." Four years later the Los Angeles Times declared, "presidential debates have become boring." This is the same Los Angeles Times that in 2001 insisted that mayoral candidates James K. Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa "lay out a compelling and specific vision, not in commercials, slick mailers or sound bites but in forums and debates where they can be challenged," that in March 2003 condemned "the failure of Democrats in Congress to robustly debate Bush’s policy on Iraq when it could have affected events," and in an September 3, 2003 editorial titled "Real Candidates Do Debates" berated contender Arnold Schwarzenegger for "refusing to enter more than one debate or candidate forum before the Oct. 7 election to recall Gov. Gray Davis."
The Times obviously has different standards for presidential debates.
When Bush gave a speech in Phoenix and Kerry gave one in Detroit on the same day, Friday, March 26, the Times commented "Although Bush was in the Sun Belt and Kerry in the Rust Belt, the two candidates were in effect debating one another on the national stage."
The press seem not to have noticed that the public would like to see the debaters come closer together than Phoenix and Detroit. The public want Ali-Frazier. What they get is a press managed cross-continent serving of sound bites, heavily edited speeches and press conference clips, TV and radio ads, and talking heads analysis.
The press seem not to understand that live debates between the candidates would be infinitely more stimulating, entertaining, informative and productive of true democracy than the thin talk-show gruel they ladle out to their consumers.
Not having debates suits the press just fine as it assures continuing employment of an army of talking heads, political writers, columnists, cartoonists and photographers (15,000 at the Democratic National Convention, 17,000 at the Republican convention), allows them to assume the role of orchestrator of the campaign, to dominate and direct, to choose what to include and what to leave out, and in short, to exert an unhealthy effect on choosing the next president by virtue of controlling the national supply of information.
Not having debates has at least three bad consequences, and there are probably others. It allows Bush, in partnership with the press, to stage manage the entire election year. It installs a barrier, the press, between the candidates and the voters, and it guarantees that the Bush hypnosis will not be broken by the distracting presence of the contender Kerry on the same stage with the president of the United States until the final hectic days of the campaign when it may very well be too late.
In its latest take on debates, the Los Angeles Times commented in editions of September 6, "An incumbent normally would be loathe to share a stage with his rival, lest it elevate the opponent’s stature." The story was about the 1996 contest for Kerry’s Senate seat against Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld, in which the two men debated each other. Kerry could have rejected debates, and arguably made his reelection easier, as Bush is attempting in 2004. That explains Bush-Kerry 2004, but what about Bush-Gore 2000, when Bush wasn’t the incumbent but was treated by the press as if he was?
Deference Hypnosis
What is at work here is deference hypnosis, also known as authority hypnosis or prestige hypnosis, and sometimes celebrity hypnosis. Deference hypnosis bestows a stature that doesn’t have to be earned and may not be deserved.
Political hypnosis expert Gustave LeBon in 1897 said of deference hypnosis, "The mere fact that an individual occupies a certain position, possesses a certain fortune, or bears certain titles, endows him with prestige, however slight his own personal worth." He could have been talking about George W. Bush. With his incumbency, his famous family, his former ownership of the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, his ties to the Saudi royal family and Big Oil, Bush is a walking case of deference hypnosis.
An almost textbook example of deference hypnosis occurred July 4 when Bush appeared in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia. The way for his appearance before a crowd roused to patriotic war fervor had been paved by an editorial in the Charleston Daily Mail, the state’s biggest circulation daily newspaper.
A fawning tribute to Bush, subtitled "Welcome Bush, the liberator of Iraq," was penned by Don Surber, Daily Mail editorial columnist, two days before Bush’s arrival. "On Sunday, Charleston will be honored by the presence of one of the two world leaders who stood up to evil," Surber wrote, reminding readers that Bush had been maligned "by the lies of the left" and falsely charged with "stealing the election in Florida."
The 6,500 Charlestonians greeting Bush, described as "boisterous" in a New York Times story, "waved American flags and yelled ‘four more years,’" when Bush declared that "the founders would be proud of America today" and that American military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has made terrorists ‘desperate’ and ‘furious.’"
Afterwards, Bush was interviewed by Daily Mail political editor Chris Stirewalt, who was almost reverential in the presence of the great man. Stirewalt, who apparently asked no questions about the Iraq war, or anything else of consequence, said he found Bush to be "an engaged and engaging interview subject" who spoke of "his presidential doctrine of defeating the jihadists by nurturing free societies....a guy who topples terror regimes and passes notes to Tony Blair at NATO meetings..." and who Stirewalt didn’t expect "to take too much time or energy for the Charleston Daily Mail and me." At the end of the interview, Bush told Stirewalt, "I like talking to you."
Walk to the White House
In a Los Angeles Times column of March 9, 2000, National Journal editor-in-chief Michael Kelly (killed as an ‘embed’ in Operation Iraqi Freedom) salivated at the prospect of Gore-Bush debates.
"Contemplate, if you are pitiless, the Gore-Bush debates. In the Republican primary debates, Bush demonstrated repeatedly not only that he is not smarter than the average bear, but that he knows this and is perpetually afraid of exposure. He regards even simple invitations to express his views not as opportunities but as looming disasters. He is deeply insecure about almost anything involving knowledge or opinion..... These are the ingrained mannerisms of the student whose desperate wish is to get through class without being called on and laughed at. In a debate with the razor-fanged Gore, such traits are going to show very badly."
It never happened. In one of the big failures of modern journalism, the press let Dubya walk. And walk he did, right into the presidency.
The press is making the same mistake - again.
Note: In the latest episode of "Debate Duck," papers of Friday, August 27 reported that the Bush campaign rejected a new challenge by John Kerry for weekly debates with Bush until Election Day. The proposal by Kerry was said to have been triggered by a new census report that wages have fallen and health care costs have risen under the Bush Administration. Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt turned aside Kerry’s debate challenge, saying "During the next few weeks, John Kerry should take the time to finish the debates with himself." In March, Schmidt made a similar statement in rejecting Kerry’s proposal for monthly debates: "Senator Kerry should finish the debate with himself before he starts trying to explain his position to voters."
Russell M. Drake is a journalist in Yucca Valley, California. <russ33@msn.com>
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