by hilzoy
Sorry to have been absent: I’ve been having internet problems. I did manage to catch a little CNN coverage after I got in last night, and it was absolutely surreal: the convention they are covering bears no relation whatsoever to the one I had been walking around observing all yesterday.
I’ve been wandering around having random conversations, and by pure chance, all the delegates I’ve talked to have been Clinton delegates. I have asked all of them whether they will have any problem voting for Obama, or are in any way aware of any of the disunity I see so much about on CNN. In every case the answer is not just ‘no’, but something closer to ‘are you crazy?’ The first Clinton delegate I talked to said: “For heaven’s sakes, we’re Democrats.” The second said: “I’m sure some Clinton supporters, somewhere, won’t support Obama, but everyone who thinks will.” I cannot pretend that the delegates I’ve talked to are in any way representative, but for what it’s worth, they have all reacted to the idea of not supporting Obama by looking at me as though I had come from Mars.
What they are concerned about, more than anything else, is the economy. I would have thought that a convention full of people who can somehow afford to take a week off and get to Denver might be somewhat insulated from that, but I would have been wrong. One of them was telling me, at some length, about the economic problems in her town: the way everyone is cutting back, the fact that she and her husband used to go out to eat every so often, but have cut that out along with the rest of their luxuries, the effects this is all having on local restaurants and other merchants, her fear that it will only get worse, and that politicians do not really get how bad it is. She was sure that the Republicans don’t get it; she has her doubts about some people in the upper reaches of the Democratic party. She had none about Obama.
The delegates and politicians I have talked to are all passionate this year. They are really committed to Obama, and their concerns all involve whether or not he will win, not whether or not he will be a great President if elected. Again, I have just been wandering around talking to utterly random people — the politicians I referred to above are local officials — and I have absolutely no reason to think they are representative of anything. But it’s striking that none of them have expressed anything other than real enthusiasm about the idea of Barack Obama being President. (I should say that because I have been just wandering around talking to people I meet at random, I really don’t think any of them were saying things they didn’t think for public consumption.)
To them, the drama this year involves the campaign between Obama and McCain: a lot of them are very, very afraid of four more years of a Republican presidency. It does not involve Clinton vs. Obama at all.
That’s the reason I’ve been watching it on C-SPAN–I know what the talking heads are going to do before they even do it. Glad to have some anecdata from someone on the ground to confirm what I suspected.
It’s really enormously different getting one’s convention coverage unfiltered by the MSM. I’ve been following you guys, Pam’s House Blend, updates at DailyKos, Blue Jersey, FDL — I get access to a whole bunch of different POVs who aren’t all travelling around in a pack.
And Pat Buchanan once again says that the Democrats need to be attacking McCain but that if Hillary Clinton dares to do it she’ll somehow damage herself (still no idea how that works — wasn’t her ability to attack supposed to be a selling point a few months back?).
Of course if she doesn’t attack, then the line will be that she didn’t dissuade her supporters from voting for McCain.
Glad you’re connected now, and glad you’re there, Hilzoy!
Those at home: C-SPAN is the only way to go. Why would you watch any other way? For the ads?
Nell, occasionally someone online (or on the phone) makes me want to see the idiot pundits for a few minutes. And some of the speeches the networks are skipping are boring. But I’m back to C-Span now.
“What they are concerned about, more than anything else, is the economy.”
I haven’t heard nearly enough about the economy, my No. 1 concern — nothing else is a close second.
This is one area where I think the Obama camp went wrong in trying to direct Bill Clinton on which topic to speak about, especially seeing how none of the other speakers seem to particularly be “on script.”
Bill Clinton said he wanted to talk about the economy, stupid, let him have at it. Let him draw parallels from the economy he inherited from George H.W. Bush. Let him sling some red meat. I hope he still does.
Hillzoy:
Can you ask the delegates — ideally the ‘heavy hitters’ — why they are shying away from the word ‘corruption’ in referring to the Bush years. They mention examples, like the VA hospitals and the oil industry lobbyists — and I wish they’d include the KBR ‘electrocutions’ — but they don’t use the word. And there are so many things that fall under the word, from Abramoff and Duke Cunningham to the FHA to the VA Hospitals to the US Attorney firings — corruption can be political as well as financial.
I draw comfort and reassurance from your report of the vast difference, the diametrical opposition, between the wall of unreality erected by the media masterminds and the world that lies beyond it.
Not exactly a stunning surprise of course, given the consistently perverse judgments that are a staple of your dissections. Given that their purpose is to manufacture fishwrap, to be thrown away after the fishy commercial is consumed, and given the contempt they must feel for the consumers (and to the degree they are intelligent and conscious, for themselves) we might be grateful that pockets of responsible journalism continue to exist.
Prup: an essential question. Why indeed. All manner of things come to mind. After all there is no lack of capable insight or evidence to organize into a lucid narrative. Yet the will appears to be somehow inadequate to the task.
My dad told the story of the reporter who interviewed him and other soldiers in Vietnam, asking about problems with the M-16 rifle.
Most of the soldiers told him it was a fine rifle, you just had to take care of it. (It was relatively prone to jamming if not kept clean.)
One soldier, however, well known to his fellows for complaining about the war in general and everything else in particular, was happy to gripe to the reporter about the lousy M-16.
Guess who got quoted in the resulting news article?
I have always assumed that this is how reporters actually function: start with a thesis and then look for sources that will confirm it. Doesn’t sound much like “reporting.”
I have always assumed that this is how reporters actually function: start with a thesis and then look for sources that will confirm it. Doesn’t sound much like “reporting.”
I don’t think you have that quite right. I don’t think that most reporters start out with a strong bias toward one side in a case like that. What they start out with is a strong bias in favor of their being something interesting to report. If a room with 100 people has 99 who think the world is fine and 1 who has something to complain about, the reporter is going to listen to the lone complainer. That’s where the story is, so that’s what they’re going to report.
I don’t think you have that quite right. I don’t think that most reporters start out with a strong bias toward one side in a case like that. What they start out with is a strong bias in favor of their being something interesting to report. If a room with 100 people has 99 who think the world is fine and 1 who has something to complain about, the reporter is going to listen to the lone complainer. That’s where the story is, so that’s what they’re going to report.
Indeed.
I eagerly look forward to the tidal wave of reporting we will hear from the RNC next week all about Ron Paul’s supporters, and about the fissures between the balanced budget fiscal-cons vs. the theocons and the neocons, and how the nativist branch of the GOP detests McCain’s stance on immigration, and how Rush Limbaugh said during the primaries that McCain would destroy the Republican party and he (Rush) would rather vote for Hillary, and all the other conflict which our liberal news media will seek out and focus on and blather about endlessly to the extreme detriment of anything that the GOP or the candidate wants you to hear about.
You know, just like they did during the last 6 GOP conventions (going all the way back to 1984) where our press really dug and dug to find as much complaining as possible. Because they would never do that for only one out of the two political parties. If our press has any bias at all, it is obviously from being too liberal.
(1) One person complaining out of 100 is not a story, any more than the fact that 99 out of 100 aren’t complaining.
(2) I don’t think the “go with the complainer” theory fits the news coverage that we see. A dozen-plus news outlets (dubious noun) *all* think that the story is whether Hillary supporters will cross over to Obama? Based on what?
Someone gets the meme out there, and then it replicates.