A while back, a leftie friend asked me, “So if the media is so liberal and so all-powerful, how did Bush or any other Republican ever got elected?”
My answer (and I’m paraphrasing both sides of the conversation from memory) went something like this: Elections are different. Elections, especially presidential elections, are the unique times in our political lives when both sides have chances to go over the heads of the media and talk directly to the electorate.
This is not exactly new or innovative analysis, but it’s still accurate, and I’ll never cease being amazed at how many supposedly-smart people in the press forget or willfully disregard that fact of political life. Wrapped up in their own cocoon of elite consensus, the media never fails to be shocked when it learns that all the rubes out there beyond the screen… don’t agree with them.
And boy, did they get a reminder this week. Mama Palin not only made their lunch, she ate it for them, too.
It’s hard to imagine two candidates more tailor-made for diametrically opposed constituencies than Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Urban sophisticate Obama is, as Mark Steyn perfectly put it, “the new black best friend they’d been waiting for all these years” for upscale white liberals–a class that includes practically all of the national press corps who spent the last week in a frenzy over Palin. Conversely, Palin the Alaksan hunter looks like Ted Nugent crossed with Margaret Thatcher and your best friend’s mom, with a powerful dose of homespun country-girl sass thrown in to boot. You couldn’t come up with a more diametrically-opposed pair if you tried.
Obama’s eat-your-tofu pretentiousness plays perfectly to a press corps that thinks its job is to educate the rubes, while Palin’s pretentious-as-dirt manner and freezer full of moose steaks couldn’t be more perfectly calibrated to rub an urban New Class reporter any more of the wrong way. Her happy warrior persona also strikes a sharp contrast with Michelle Obama’s angry whining about having to pay back her student loans.
The differences are stark, and the over-the-top reactions from the media are telling. To take one example, Joe Klein and his ilk see a “community organizer” as a valiant leader of the proletariat, but most people outside of government, academia or the press hear “community organizer” and think, “somebody who pesters the government for other people’s money.” For folks who aren’t marinated in elite liberal concensus, the first time they heard that Obama spent several years as a “community organizer,” most thought, “Why didn’t he get a real job?” I’m sure that never occurred to Klein, which is, of course, why he’s having one of his patented sniveling fits over Palin’s speech.
Roger Simon (the pretentious one who spent years at U.S. News, not the good one with the fedora) also went back to his room to pout after being criticized over the Palin feeding frenzy. I’ll start taking Simon seriously on this one just as soon as he can show me all his clips regarding the John Edwards scandal–and I mean the ones during the eight months when that story was an open but unreported secret among a press corps that swooned for Edwards long ago (or, alternately, as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, “I for one am getting awfully bored by all those New York Times front-pagers on [Palin’s] son’s military service”). Simon also can’t understand why he’s being criticized–doesn’t everybody know that it’s the media’s job to expose evil–and that by definition, all conservatives are evil?
It’s been a very instructional week all around, and not a good one for the national press. Shame they won’t learn anything from it.
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