Seizing the Bully Pulpit
It is now clear that Obama’s presidency will be a very public presidency. In the two and a half months since his inauguration, he has likely accumulated more media exposure than George Bush did in his first two years of office.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.
No one who has studied the Obama campaign has failed to be impressed with his strategic focus, that is, his ability and willingness to sacrifice immediate gains in the interest of ultimate victory. Long before the primaries, Obama had determined what was and was not essential to winning the Democratic nomination and general election, and, although he was quick to change tactics that were not working, his strategic plan to obtain a majority of convention delegates and then electoral votes remained relatively constant.
So when Obama makes himself accessible to the media to the extent that he has done, one can be fairly certain that such openness is not necessarily an exercise in ego-gratification, but the result of cold, hard calculations about what he must do to govern.
For reasons not immediately relevant to this discussion, George Bush speaks execrably in public, his speech consisting of little more than sentence fragments, malapropisms, oxymorons and grammatical train-wrecks that would have made Will Rogers blush. Yet it is universally conceded that this limitation did not hinder him in 2000 or 2004, when he came so close to winning both elections over far more able opponents, that—with a little help from his father’s appointees at the U. S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell in 2004—he became president both times. Not only did he become president, he was able to effectively push his right-wing political and economic agendas through Congress with little need to appeal personally to the public.
Bush could do this because he had a distinct advantage over Obama: the corporate media is inherently conservative. It goes without saying that, since its founding, the Fox empire has functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. The other networks, however, all of them either megacorporations or subsidiaries of megacorporations, have remained strongly biased toward right-wing, conservative positions on almost all the major public issues. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor. ABC is a subsidiary of Disney, and CBS is the result of a merger with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which at the time of the merger was a major defense contractor. The majority of “experts” who regularly appear on the networks are right-wing, or, at best, middle of the road, which in today’s context means Republican lite. In such an environment, progressive alternatives to the corporatist agenda never make it to the public.
The media, in other words, did much of Bush’s speaking for him. During Clinton’s presidency, the media, under the guise of objective reporting, served mainly as an echo chamber for the Republican Party and relayed uncritically their attacks on Clinton at every opportunity. Given this history, we can reasonably expect that Obama will get virtually no help from the same media that gave Bush a pass at every turn. They will seize upon even the slightest slip-ups by Obama and his family, and if the inevitable mistakes fail to appear, they will be fabricated as the needs arise, like the recent “outrage” over Mrs. Obama’s improperly touching the queen of England.
Obama’s response to this state of affairs has been to seize and wield the bully pulpit more effectively than any president since Jack Kennedy. Having observed that silence in the face of innuendoes, half-truths, and outright lies is fatal to a progressive politician, that the truth may or may not ultimately out by itself, and that it is political suicide to depend upon the media as a disinterested provider of timely and accurate information to the public, he has, at least up to now, preempted his opponents’ place in the national conversation and is using it to advance a mostly progressive agenda.
The media, accustomed to defining and guiding the national agenda by creating narratives that explain to the public why things are the way they are, has been at least temporally thwarted in exercising its usual role. The power to tell a story that runs around in everyone’s mind—George Lakoff calls it “framing”—is an awesome power, almost godlike. The media made Bush president twice by creating stories about his opponents that they were unable or unwilling to overcome with stories of their own. In both cases, the media stories were mixtures of truth and falsehood that contained just enough of the former to keep them from being rejected outright, and enough of the latter to make people feel uneasy voting for their targets.
In the case of Al Gore, the media story was that Gore was untruthful and boring. He was reported to have claimed that he invented the Internet, and that the novel, Love Story, was written about him and his wife, Tipper.
John Kerry, a recipient of three purple hearts during the Vietnam War, was subjected to a series of scurrilous lies by a group of veterans known as the “Swiftboaters,” who claimed that he did not deserve the medals he received.
Neither Gore nor Kerry successfully overcame the unfavorable and mostly untruthful media narratives that their Republican opponents threw against them.
My disappointment with the Clinton administration is well-documented in the pages of this web site, but his presidency was a failure in many respects because the Republicans and their allies in the media were able to push their own story into the minds of the public—creating a reality that was at odds with the truth—without serious opposition. Bill Clinton came into office with good intentions and high hopes, but a conservative tidal wave, nurtured by fear, greed and dishonesty about its real intentions (aided by Clinton’s own personal shortcomings), reduced him to a survivor, barely able to hold on to office in the face of a ferocious onslaught by the conservative think tanks, the media, and congressional Republicans. Obama knows perfectly well that the same forces intend a similar fate for his presidency and he is determined not to let that happen.
While he has not completely eliminated the power of the media to dominate the political mindscape, he has successfully developed a preemptive strategy that up to now has disrupted their attempts to construct a consistent, unfavorable myth that they can insinuate into the public unconsciousness through endless repetition. By promptly communicating his positions and their rationale to the public before the poison takes effect, he has repeatedly made his antagonists look like fools, knaves, or just sore losers.
I think this is good, not so much because I am enjoying watching the media’s discomfiture (which I am), or because I have an inflated opinion of Obama’s abilities (which are impressive in any case), but because Obama can now be judged by what he actually accomplishes, rather than by what the Republican leadership, the Fox network, and George Will would like us to believe that he has accomplished.
And that is an accomplishment worth applauding.
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