When I’m in the market for Sunday morning Beltway bloviation, I generally prefer Stephanopoulos to Russert. A: I like ABC’s roundtable, especially when Fareed Zakaria and George Will lock up. B: Cokie Roberts perfectly personifies D.C. group-think. There is no better example of limp. Georgetown cocktail punditry this side of David Broder. And I like that. Roberts provides a valuable service. I think its important to maintain contact with so reliable a barometer for craven pandering to shifting political fortune. And C: For as connected and savvy as Russert is about horse race politics, I’m constantly dismayed at the way he maneuvers for the “gotcha” question and resulting simplistic headlines.
With the ’08 election only two light years away I remain a fan of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. In stark contrast to the confederacy of cynical dunces who have driven the truck of state so deep into the ditch, Edwards has always impressed me as being both serious and smart. Very smart. Smart enough to know there’s no way to explain his vote authorizing force in Iraq other than to say it was a mistake and hope that the public is finally in a mood to appreciate a politician willing to say he, (or SHE), was wrong and has recalculated accordingly.
Russert had Edwards on for the entire hour this morning, (which he says he will do for other major candidates … but I’ll be amazed if he does for the likes of Sam Brownback and Tom Vilsack). Russert played the usual tapes of Edwards supporting the war resolution in ’02 and tap-dancing around the question of pulling the plug in the last weeks of the ’04 campaign. Edwards didn’t flinch. He continued to concede his error and say that, like everyone else, he should be held accountable for what he says and does.
All that was fine. Holding government accountable is a primary function of the press. But the example of Russert maneuvering for low-brow, “gotcha bounce”, where The Drudge Reports of the world can grab a headline pulled straight ” … from ‘Meet the Press’ “, is when like some B-list Buffalo radio jock … he asks Edwards, “Are you saying you’ll raise taxes … ” to pay for various improvements in health care coverage.
Edwards’ response was a quick and honest, “Yes.” Which gets points for honesty. Anyone who says they’ll improve one thing about this country’s health care mess without taxing SOMEONE is swimming in bullshit. But obviously, everything about health care reform is eye-glazingly complicated, including how and who you tax to improve it. Edwards, well-prepared like a top-rate trial lawyer, had his ducks in line and ran through a sound-bite tested string of likely fixes, including pulling down Bush’s tax cuts for the upper 10% and perhaps adding taxation to the health care industry. (More taxes on, say, United Health!? The horror! The outrage! Can’t you just hear Limbaugh spinning that into new, onerous taxes on “working class Americans”?)
Anyway, Russert nodded as Edward ran through his checklist of possible new funding sources and responded, not by asking for a specific on who in the health establishment might be in his gun-sights for new taxation — which would have been interesting and truly NEWS worthy. Instead, Horse Race Russert’s only reaction to Edwards’ quick list of revenue options was to repeat, for headline writers everywhere, “So you’d raise taxes?”
You run a tightly scripted show, Timmer, but occasionally I’d like to see a heightened level of nuance in those follow-ups.
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