Out of morbid curiosity, I watched Morning Joe for a while this morning. It was pretty hilarious. The general consensus ranged from a GOP victory tonight would be a poisoned chalice for the Republicans because they will learn the wrong lessons from it, to mockery of the GOP for failing to do even better.
Alas, it was hard to hear everything above all of the goalpost moving but I did catch one odd note through the din. Chuck Todd made the point that the pivotal moment in this election cycle was Chris McDaniel’s failure to wrest the GOP nomination from Mississippi senator Thad Cochran. According to Todd, that saved the entire Republican field from being forced to answer for everything McDaniel said and all of the skeletons in his closet (this only happened a few minutes ago, so I don’t have exact quotes). In short, McDaniel would have been this cycle’s Todd Akin, dragging down the whole party.
Now, as a matter of analysis, Todd may be exactly right. He says he talked to many Republicans who’ve said as much to him, and I believe him.
But let’s unpack this for a moment. How would McDaniel become an albatross for the GOP? By what mechanism? Sure, the Democrats would do their part. But I feel like there’s this other group that would have an outsized role in the process. What could it be? No, not the Shriners. Not the Quakers. Oh, I’ve got it: The mainstream media!
Left unsaid in Todd’s theory is why the press should hold the entire Republican party hostage to the views of one candidate but never hold the entire Democratic party to the views of the sitting president or vice president (or DNC Chair, or Senate Majority Leader et al). The simple fact is that the mainstream media in general, and the cast of establishment liberals who cycle through Morning Joe in particular, believe they are just doing good journalism when they hound all Republicans for one Republican’s gaffe. But when a Democrat fouls up it’s an isolated incident sparking false outrage. If you truly don’t think there’s a double standard here, it’s probably because you hold the single standard that liberals are always right.
Where is the feeding frenzy of journalists asking Democratic candidates A thru Z whether they agree with the latest “gaffe” or policy statement from — take your pick — Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Bruce Braley, Mary Landrieu, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, or Wendy Davis?
Where are the Saturday Night Live sketches mocking Obama? Kyle Smith asked not long ago. Here’s the answer he found in a book about SNL’s political comedy. It turns out Obama is “completely unmockable”:
We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime “Saturday Night Live” specialist in political japery. “If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”
“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature. [Al] Gore had these ‘handles,’ so did Bush, and Sarah Palin, and even Hillary had them. But with Obama, it was the phenomenon — less about him and more about the effect he had on other people and the way he changed their behavior. So that’s the way I wrote him.”
To which Smith replies:
Got that? The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is “Austrian,” that you pronounce the p in “corpsman” and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time “behind enemy lines.” The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth.
Nope, nothing there to mock. No way to get a grip on this polished, oiled obsidian.
Well, I think comedy is a lot like outrage, both are in the eye of the beholder. The MSM simply doesn’t think Democratic gaffes are all that big a deal for the same reason they don’t think making fun of Obama is funny. It’s an aesthetic and ideological predisposition masquerading as journalistic judgment.