Once in a while a bit of reality seeps through, and into, those limited and pre-packaged ‘debates’ allowed by our large media outlets in the election campaign.
Last night’s New Hampshire Republican Debate, hosted by Fox News, is an example. Much as I would prefer not to give free advertising to or to do product placement for Rupert Murdoch, I have to admit that
1) I watched the production;
2) I was not surprised that viewers rated Congressman Ron Paul of Texas the ‘winner’ and that former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee came in second; and that
3) Sen. John McCain of
The audience phone-in American Idol-typevoteran 33 percent for Ron Paul, 18 percent for Mike Huckabee, about 16 percent for Rudy Giuliani and 15 percent for John McCain, and only 12 percent for Mitt Romney.
All of this confirms my own prior impressions of the candidates, but in narrowly partisan terms none of this is good news for Democrats. Paul and Huckabee have much stronger voices than Romney and Giuliani and pose an incomparably greater threat to Democrats’ chances of winning the White House. Only if the GOP nominates its usual corporate-safety-first candidate and Ron Paul decides to mount an independent campaign, based on his consistent and authentic opposition to the unconstitutional war, can Dems benefit politically from his being on the other side. Even then, if the Dems nominated Hillary Clinton, Paul would be destined to get quite a few votes that would otherwise go the other way. Or enough Dems and others could become so sickened by both the war and the nomination that we might get a genuine fourth-party campaign as well as a genuine third-party campaign. Then it would be anybody’s ball game.
All of this speculation is premature. This is 2007, and it is galling that Fox and the networks talk about ‘after Labor Day’ as though deliberately willing the country to forget that campaigns are supposed to gear up after Labor Day in an election year, not in an off-year. One hopeful and positive lesson to be taken away is that citizens need to focus on Congress. We need a stronger Congress, and the existing brittle media-party apparatus is on the whole less powerful at keeping the legislature than the White House under suffocating wraps. Same for the state legislatures.
Speaking of threats, Fox seems to have decided very quickly that, of the three candidates who came across best last night – Paul, Huckabee and McCain – it is McCain who poses the least threat to its own interests. Fox personnel did their best to ridicule and laugh down Ron Paul last night, not concealing the effort. Simultaneously they also touted McCain’s ‘surprisingly’ good performance. This morning, Fox News is not exactly emphasizing how well Paul and Huckabee scored with viewers, opting rather to trumpet Fred Thompson’s announcement with Jay Leno – even though Thompson skipped Fox’s own event to tape the Tonight show. (At this writing, Fox has not archived a transcript of the debate.)
The big moment in the show came when Huckabee sparred with Ron Paul, each man politely keeping his cool and defending his position on
The exchange began when Huckabee narrated the ‘Pottery Barn’ principle as a lesson from childhood, saying that when he went into a store, if he accidentally broke something, his mother said he had bought it:
“Congressman, whether or not we should have gone to
Paul responded that “The American people didn't go in. A few people advising this administration, a small number of people called the neoconservatives, hijacked our foreign policy. They are responsible, not the American people.”
Huckabee shot back that we are all supposed to be united in wartime: “Congressman, we are one nation. We can't be divided. We have to be one nation under God. That means if we make a mistake, we make it as a single country.”
Paul replied, equally forcefully, “When we make a mistake, it is the obligation of the people — through their representatives — to correct the mistake, not continue the mistake. We have dug a hole for ourselves and we have dug a hole for our party. We are losing elections, and we are going down next year if we don't change it.”
Huckabee: “Even if we lose elections, we should not lose our honor.”
Today’s news reports on the exchange cut it off there, following the lead of Fox’s Sean Hannity after the debate and giving Huckabee the last word, "honor."
Actually, it was Paul who had the last word, saying that our staying in
Saving face in
Too bad our news outlets somehow failed to include them in published reports this morning.
Meanwhile, that whole ‘Pottery Barn’ metaphor for the
As my son, also watching the
Using ‘Iraq’ as a substitute for ‘Pottery Barn’ is more like saying, you break into a store during the night, you break something – or rather, you trash almost everything in the store – and then you do . . . what? Who is there? There’s not even anyone around to tell you to pay, or what to pay, or how to pay, and somebody who broke in isn’t there to pay, to begin with. Then if you don’t finish trashing everything during that one break-in, you keep on breaking in, on a whole series of nights, until you’ve trashed almost everything. Then you occupy the store.
Your mama taught you that?
Stumble It!