EKlein and GFR think John Edwards is to blame for the Modo Hair Story Fiasco. I join with Scott Lemieux in placing the onus purely on Dowd and her peers in the media:
The error they're making, I think, it to assume that these charges have some sort of objective merit to someone, or that there's some way of avoiding having junior high narratives being developed about you. Consider what similar advice given to Al Gore would look like (and there are many people who blamed Gore for running a horrible, horrible campaign and not adapting to the media.) He wouldn't be able to wear "earth tone" suits, or casual jackets, or Armani suits, or work clothes...actually, I'm not sure what he could wear. He couldn't discuss past political achievements because the media would distort them and make them look arrogant. He can't pass on things a newspaper told him about his friend's novel because it might not turn out to be fully true. He can't pay a feminist consultant. And on and on and on. And if he had done all of these things, Dowd, Rich, Connolly, et al. still would have just made stuff up out of whole cloth, as they in fact did. And it's the same thing with Kerry. If he engages in his actual hobbies, he's an upper class twit. If he does anything else, he's a phony.
One should note that there's a trap here designed to make it impossible, in practice, for anyone to advocate effectively on behalf of working class Americans. It's simply not possible, given the way the American political system works, for a person to be in a position to run for president without having achieved high socioeconomic status. A person will, in that position, be condemned by the press as a hypocrite if he acts like someone with money, and condemned by the press as a phony if he acts like someone without money (indeed, Edwards even got in trouble earlier for acting like a working class person who got rich and bought a tastelessly large house). Meanwhile, someone like George W. Bush who eschews the interests of working class Americans in favor culturalist posturing can get a free pass on sailing in Kennebunkport, and a free pass on phony working class affectations. No real person can uniformly avoid these "errors" -- it's the media dynamic that needs to change.
UPDATE: Also -- what Paul Waldman said. The fact that Maureen Dowd is literally recycling Republican National Committee talking points tells you 90 percent of what you need to know about this.
| 
Heads in the Sand
As I said on the LGM website, the only way the dynamic changes is for the Dems to start getting aggressive, with both the GOP and the press. You're right about the class issue, but another pernicious meme working here is that Dems are all girly-men (except for HRC, who's a castrating bitch). This underlies the damaging perception that only the GOP can be trusted with security. The Dems have simply got to stop being passive (which LGM unfortunately advocated: "ignore them"), and make the GOP and the media afraid of them (the way the media and the Dems are already afraid of the GOP). I thought Kerry should have aggressively challenged Bush' draft-dodging in response to the Swift Boat smears, and Edwards should point out the idiocy of talking about haircuts when people are dying in Iraq. The only prominent Dem who seems to get it is Pelosi: her responses to Bush' attacks have been dismissive to the point of contempt. That's perfect, and I'm sure that's part of her rising popularity, despite the VRWC against her.
Posted by beckya57 | April 22, 2007 4:27 PM