An election cycle that breaks all the rules - and the establishment is in knots

by: Pam Spaulding

Fri Feb 08, 2008 at 17:30:00 PM EST

Well-paid pundits pull "analysis" out of their posteriors during these primaries and caucuses and have nothing to back up their predictions (which usually end up wrong anyway). Political experts both in the campaigns, the pollsters and in the MSM really don't know WTF they are chattering about, but they simply cannot admit it. You get the feeling when you watch that they think they know more than you do and want to project that all-knowing gravitas, but as we've seen, all that some of them have managed to do is look like jackasses over and over.

Why? This is an presidential election with so many firsts -- a black man and a woman at the precipice of being a party's nominee, a Mormon candidate, a former president campaigning for his wife -- all the rules and standard operating procedures have gone out the window and you see serious on-air and in-print fumbling. There are desperate attempts to make sense of wide margins of victory that were not predicted (for Clinton or Obama), why John McCain's campaign rose from the dead, or what role did anti-Mormonism play in Romney's defeat. No one knows, and they cannot claim to know. There are no "experts" on this. Part of the mystery is that the voters are not behaving in predictable fashion, and the establishment doesn't like unpredictability.  

I think it's refreshing to see the chaos, as it provides ample entertainment to see pundits self-immolate on live TV. There's so much freelancing and free association going on that is actually foot-in-mouth disease, as cultural and gender biases just tumble out. It's fascinating, if painful. If only opportunities like these would turn into more self-reflection on the role of subjects that are avoided in polite company because it makes people uncomfortable. We have another example today...

What's infinitely interesting about the odd oozing of misogyny in this election cycle is how easily it slips from the lips of talking heads on the air who don't seem to have a clue that what they say is sexist in any way.

Chelsea Clinton, who has been out on the road stumping for her mom, trying to twist a few superdelegate arms, you know, doing what most political adult children do for their parents who are running for office. Somehow, the mind of MSNBC's David Shuster (normally a stellar reporter, btw), had a Cro-Magnon moment with this comment. (via Shakesville):

The segment began with Shuster saying, which is not on the video: "There's just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea's out there calling up celebrities, saying support my mom, and she's apparently also calling these super delegates." To which Bill Press replied: "Hey, she's working for her mom. What's unseemly about that? During the last campaign, the Bush twins were out working for their dad. I think it's great, I think she's grown up in a political family-" which is where the video picks up:

PRESS: -she's got politics in her blood, she loves her mom, she thinks she'd make a great president [crosstalk]

SHUSTER: But doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way? [laughter]

PRESS: No! If she didn't want to be there, she wouldn't be there. I mean, give Chelsea a break.

In one fell swoop, Hillary is cast as a madam who forcibly "pimps out" her own daughter, and Chelsea is cast as a pathetic, vulnerable, and mindless whore who has no control over her own life.

"Last, night I used a phrase, some slang about her efforts...I didn't think people would take it literally, but some people have, and to the extent that people feel that I was being pejorative about the actions of Chelsea Clinton making these phone calls, to the extent people thought I was being pejorative, I apologize for that."

On Thursday's "Tucker" on MSNBC, David Shuster, who was serving as guest-host of the program, made a comment about Chelsea Clinton and the Clinton campaign that was irresponsible and inappropriate. Shuster, who apologized this morning on MSNBC and will again this evening, has been suspended from appearing on all NBC News broadcasts, other than to make his apology. He has also extended an apology to the Clinton family. NBC News takes these matters seriously, and offers our sincere regrets to the Clintons for the remarks.

Dissecting the genesis of The Tweety Effect

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters has an interesting column up about how The Tweety Effect ("Where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head"), coined and defined by your blogmistress, spread virally in the blogosphere during the Chris Matthews misogyny fracas prior to the New Hampshire primary. The MSNBC pontificator spent a lot of energy demeaning Hillary Clinton over her "emotional moment." It was hardly the first time he let his Inner Cro-Magnon show.

I was interviewed for the piece as part of Eric's analysis of how the term flew around the blogosphere and ultimately forced Matthews to make an apology.

"The importance of tonight's win cannot be understated. It was a revolt of women sick and tired of the likes of Chris Tweety Matthews and the Media Misogynists. Their hatred of Hillary Clinton was soundly rejected by the voters," announced TalkLeft, an influential liberal blog published out of Denver, Colorado, by defense attorney Jeralyn E. Merritt.

Blogging from her home in Durham, North Carolina, that night, Pam Spaulding quickly spotted the TalkLeft post and immediately copied-and-pasted it into the comments section at Pandagon, a prominent feminist blog that was posting lots of New Hampshire coverage and commentary.

No fan of Clinton's (Spaulding says she'd written "horrid" things about Clinton's candidacy prior to New Hampshire), the feminist blogger, whose widely read site normally focuses on gay and lesbian issues, felt compelled to come to the former first lady's defense.

"The gender bias, this was stuff that women bloggers had been writing about for some time and now the Clinton coverage was proof of what we've known all along," says Spaulding. "Even though I would prefer not to see Hillary Clinton as president, I do no want to see that kind of discourse on the talking heads programs. You expected the Republicans to slap her like that. But the fact that you had purportedly objective members of the media pontificating like that, it was almost like a gang up on her. It truly was unacceptable."

...Now the firestorm had a name and it had been properly framed for further debate and discussion. "It was a shorthand that people became comfortable with and that's [what] Republicans are usually good at," says Spaulding. "They're good at 'cut and run' and 'flip flopper.' They know how to use the language and press it over and over again."

...Just moments before Spaulding typed up the Tweety Effect, the stalwart liberal blogger and sharp-eyed media watcher known simply as Digby had lowered her own boom on the press that night: "All the sickening media sexism we saw over the past couple of days didn't work and all liberals of good conscience should be relieved by that."

After publishing her post and still thirsty for more information and more opinions, Digby, from her home in Santa Monica, California, went over to Pandagon to see what the site's bloggers and readers were saying about New Hampshire. Wading deep down into the comments section, Digby came across Spaulding's "Tweety Effect" reference and knew it was too good not to pass along. "It just spoke to me," says Digby. "It had a nice ring to it and it really seemed to explain what we had all been feeling over the last few days." So the blogger went back and updated her post to include a link to Spaulding's Tweety Effect item.

And at that point, the Tweety Effect really began to pin-ball around the liberal blogosphere. "The hits were out of control," says Spaulding. "I really didn't think that it was going to take off like that. People who have never linked to my blog picked up on it." (Days later, Spaulding was invited to appear on CNN as a guest.)

***

The mainstream media, the pundits, the consultant class, the surrogates for campaigns -- all have been wrong, sometimes very wrongheaded, and they lack any humility when called on the carpet.

Here's another example of political free-form asshattery, the kind of thinking aloud that really makes you wonder about folks in the rarified air of professional political commentary. From John Derbyshire at the National Review, theories on how "black" a state's population is determines whether they will vote for THE BLACK MAN.

A meme with content along the lines of the following, is zipping around the blogosphere:

Barack Obama has been doing well (and presumably will continue to do well) in

   (a) places where there are big numbers of black people

and

   (b) places where there are very few black people.

In the (a) places, black voters will turn out for him in droves. In the (b) places, people feel little racial tension, will take the candidate on his merits, and be pleased by his uplifting rhetoric.

However, in places where the proportion of black citizens is big enough to cause tension, but not big enough to swing an election, the white majority will not support Obama, and he will do badly.

Applying that line of thinking to the voting process in this cycle is weak; there are too many factors to consider, and states cannot so easily be pigeonholed to make broad generalizations like this. To his credit, Derbyshire isn't citing any bogus statistics to back up this BS, but is floating it out there to be validated by some other "big brain" who will pontificate the same in their column/blog. As we all know, half the punditry is regurgitated BS like this. Repeat it enough and someone will be deemed brilliant.

As I said, this election cycle is not like any other, look at how wrong the pollsters have been, the political savants, the talking heads, the consultants, the fundraisers. It's a beautiful thing for democracy, even if it is messy. Too bad Derbyshire and the rest are breaking their craniums to try to fit what's happening into a cubby hole so they can feel comfortable. It's unsettling for people who think they know politics when things are upended so wonderfully.