The mainstream press has been fixated on the silly game of assessing how much damage Dick Cheney has caused the Republicans. Bill Kristol is having none of it:
He challenged the president to release CIA memos evaluating the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques. He raised the question of whether congressional Democrats–Nancy Pelosi, for one–had known of, and at least tacitly approved of, the allegedly horrifying abuses of the allegedly lawless Bush administration. Now, a month later, Pelosi is attacking career CIA officials for lying to Congress, and other Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from her. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has pulled back on threats to prosecute Bush-era lawyers, reversed itself on releasing photos of alleged military abuse of prisoners, and embraced the use of military commissions to try captured terrorists. The administration now looks irresponsible when it lives up to candidate Obama’s rhetoric, and hypocritical when it vindicates Bush policies the candidate attacked.
But the media’s certainty that, of course, Cheney couldn’t make headway and, of course, every TV appearance was a disaster for Obama’s critics was, I strongly suspect, shared by the White House. In fact they taunted and poked at Cheney and gleefully declared he was a fine spokesperson for the GOP ( wink, wink — and you know what that means).
In this obsession over Cheney’s unpopularity the mainstream media and the Obama administration share a common and debilitating fault: an preoccupation with personality and polling data. It makes not one wit of difference that someone not running for office has a current popularity rating of 20% — if what he is saying is deadly accurate and central to a key policy debate. The media and the administration somehow believed Cheney was irrelevant because they, not he, are hung up on irrelevant data points and are largely immune to arguments on the merits.
The media is obsessed with who the “leader” of the minority party is and who the “frontrunner for 2012” is. How bizarrely out of touch are they? Well, no more so than the Obama team which spent weeks tying the GOP to Rush Limbaugh while they created a disastrous stimulus package and frittered away a trillion dollars.
The administration and the media jointly overlooked the power of Cheney’s message which was based on a set of facts over which he has complete mastery (and which they were either indifferent to or ignorant of). So they now sit slack-jawed while Cheney has largely pinned the Obama team to the mat.
Perhaps the media would do well to start brushing up on some basic facts. What are the relevant statutes regarding “torture” that were in place at the relevant time, what’s the basis for prosecution of Bush officials, what statutes might prevent release of Guantanamo detainees, what is the record of the released Guantanamo detainees, what did the Bush military tribunals entail, etc. In other words, rather than reporting as if this were a popularity contest (Obama wins because his Q rating is triple Cheney’s!) they might examine the underlying facts bedeviling the administration. And the administration? Rather than play “pin the tail on the least popular Republican,” they might give up the Bush-Cheney vendetta and start governing like grown-ups, considering what is best for the nation’s security first and not as a last resort. If they did that, they might not miss the next pothole in their national security planning.
