posted 2007/07/14 at 22:43
Clinton, Edwards overheard planning to eliminate other Democratic candidates (kucinich.us)
I wish I could say that this came as any small shock to me. Perhaps there was a bit of shock involved here as I can remember Kucinich and Edwards swapping delegates at the 2004 Iowa Caucus to better both their showings (the first time I realized that even though Kucinich is one of the most principled politicians in Washington, he's not above using political machina to his advantage when he can), but that was just small. I don't think there's any irony in the fact that Fox News were the ones to leave their microphones on to catch this conversation, but if this was a deliberate attempt on their part to do damage to the leading Democratic candidates (which, as much as I dislike Fox News, I doubt), you have to wonder at the wisdom of helping the most conservative- and corporate-unfriendly major party candidate in the race right now.
Taken by itself, the simple exchange between Clinton and Edwards, as much as I dislike it, wouldn't have been that big a deal to me; in fact, I don't particularly see how an exchange like this is newsworthy in the first place. It's not like we don't assume that candidates in any political election may sometimes conspire to narrow the race down to just themselves. The non-denials that the Clinton and Edwards camps have issued since then, though, that they weren't talking about excluding the Kuciniches and Gravels of the campaign from debates but rather were talking about an alternate format where only a few candidates selected at random would debate to allow for longer answers, is ludicrous. Not only does it boggle the mind how either camp could expect anyone with more than a rudimentary knowledge of major party politics to believe this explanation, it also insults the intelligence of those of us who know better. My opinions of Clinton centrism are fairly well-known to anyone who has followed this blog for any period of time, and I never particularly cared for Edwards at all, but this episode has managed to lower my opinions of both of them quite a bit.
The notion that having so many candidates in a debate reduces each of them to "soundbite responses" is at once both true and untrue. While the format does only give each candidate a short amount of time to respond, the problem here is not the number of candidates but the lack of time for the debates. It's bad enough that we live in a soundbite culture, where the power and media elite overwork and overstimulate everyone to the point where they don't have anywhere near enough time to make rational decisions about the food they eat, let alone the politicians they vote for, so that people expect from their elected officials, if not demand, tidy, catchy little one-sentence solutions to problems that require answers ten to a hundred times longer than a simple blurt. Even if all the candidates got together and pushed for longer debates, though, the news media wouldn't allow it because it would prevent them from doing what they believe is their true function: not reporting the news, but pushing the commodities that are their anchors. There is simply no way a news network would agree to carry a long debate because they want things over with as quickly as possible, so that instead of hearing what the candidates have to say, they can give us the interpretations of the Wolf Blitzers and Chris Matthewses of the cable news world. After all, the business of the news industry these days isn't to inform the public as to what's going on in the world around them, it's to push their own talking heads as somehow being more relevant to people than their elected officials.
I wish I could say that I hold some hope that real political change will come from this gaffe, but experience has taught me better. After all, no one blinked when, following Kucinich's verbal smackdown of an ABC News moderator in a debate, ABC pulled its reporters from the campaigns of Kucinich and two other Democratic candidates, not coincidentally the other two candidates who had more than a laughable claim of possibly being called "liberal" (Carol Moseley-Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton). At the least I can be glad that this episode did give Kucinich a bit more visibility in a media that is loathe to cover him because they know that he won't fall into their pockets like the other candidates would. Perhaps this may lead to some serious consideration by the American public of how the media and the major political parties manipulate the political process so that only a certain group of people get fair coverage and access to the public as a whole, but I doubt that will happen. Certainly it won't happen if the major news outlets have any say about it (which they most certainly do).
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon