I can’t stop talking about Iowa.
I know I’m an anomaly at LSU – who can think about the Iowa caucuses with the national championships around the corner?
I can, largely because I can’t get into football.
I know there’s no worse offense a student can commit at LSU. I’m sure Johnston Hall is furiously scribbling my judicial warning for this capitol offense offense.
But I’m don’t have to hide it anymore – Iowa is upon us.
Politics is my football, and for those of you not keeping score the national press corps has revealed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s insincerity and mendacity. There’s a new rule this cycle -only traditional Republican and Democratic candidates are allowed to decry negative campaigning immediately before unveiling an attack ad.
Huckabee, our second chance from Hope, did what every man and woman brazen enough to run for president does – claim to be different just long enough to give the public another heaping helping of the same old talk.
Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic sums it up for us nicely: “Huckabee decides to play the ad he won’t broadcast for the media at [a] press conference, presumably hoping that gullible news executives will run the ad that Huckabee is too much of a saint for not airing — for free.”
In the interest of disclosure I have to tell you I don’t like Huckabee very much, although I do have $2 on him winning the nomination. All things considered, I think it’s obvious this brouhaha is nothing more than another Dean Scream: practically every other candidate has engaged in behavior far more risible than this, and neither the punditry class nor our reporters have yet to call shenanigans on them.
Huckabee promising not to go negative moments before attacking Mitt Romney isn’t news, any more than Howard Dean yelling into a bunch of microphones so his screaming supporters could hear him was four years ago.
But the press won’t let up. Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has already chimed in, declaring Huckabee the victim of a campaign implosion despite retaining a ten point lead in Iowa’s polls.
Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly notes “Reporters covering the campaign aren’t idiots[.]”
He did not source this claim.
The problem with this election cycle hasn’t been with our politicians – it’s been with our press corps’ rush to give us the next Dean Scream. Rather than highlighting the policy differences on display this go-round, we got something better from the people who are supposed to be objective observers: gossip and political payback for perceived slights.
That’s what I call an adversarial press: Huckabee’s stupidity makes the news because a country-boy insulted the collective intelligence of a gaggle of reporters.
Which brings us back to football, in a roundabout way.
I think football is more popular than politics because, in football, the stats are the stats and the scores are the scores. Fans don’t wonder if the Patriots really made history -a group of angry sportscasters can’t spin the numbers after the head coach of the Giants is mean to them.
But the Huckabee fallout proves that’s what we’ve gotten in our political coverage.
Think about it: the press has spent more time discussing Jon Edwards’ hair than they have his campaign to restore democratic power to the middle class, just as reporters have obsessed more about Oprah’s effect on Barack Obama’s campaign than the fact that Obama has yet to formulate a meaningful policy position beyond “hope.” The inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s primary victory has eclipsed the more important question of whether she is even fit to hold office – her cleavage has elicited more discussion than her Senate vote declaring the Iranian army “terrorists”.
It’s not been all bad, though. The press corps’ obsession with finding a palatable Republican to talk about has led to the rise of Huckabee and the rebirth of John McCain as the anti-Huckabee – which is nice, since John McCain isn’t crazy.
But all of this is beside the point. I like politics enough to complain about this stuff.
I like that there aren’t winners and losers, that there aren’t refs to tell us what’s important and what isn’t, what counts and what doesn’t.
I believe that in the end we get the politicians we deserve.
But I also suspect we get the news we deserve, too. While asking for more from our politicians is a mug’s game, we sure as hell can demand better from the people who write it. All we have to do is put our money where our mouth is.