Posted by
InchDeep on Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:08:03 PM
From www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Gerard Baker
| May 16, 2008
EVERY decade or so the people who control the
way we see the world anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a
Troubled Planet.
In the late 1960s the media placed the
halo on Robert Kennedy, the tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil
rights credentials made him in life - as he remains to this day in
death - a kind of devotional figure for most political journalists.
Kennedy
at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that these were by
no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was conferred a few
years later on Jimmy Carter, the plodding nonentity elevated by a
willingly compliant press into Everyman, brandishing his steely sword
of Truth against the Manichean mendacity of Richard Nixon's Republican
legacy.
Partly because of the Carter embarrassment, the 1980s
were barren years for the idolators. Try as they might, they couldn't
work themselves into much ecstasy over Walter Mondale in 1984 or
Michael Dukakis in 1988, though they had little flings with bit-part
players Gary Hart and (I kid you not) Bruce Babbitt, a genial former
governor of Arizona.
But by the 1990s a new Democrat, or
rather a New Democrat, was come among us, a man the media told us would
lift our eyes from our selfish greed and rid the world of the ineffable
misery left by 12 years of reactionary rule. It's hard to imagine now,
after the battering he's taken from his old friends in the press these
past few months, but Bill Clinton was once their idol. His cleverly
cynical balancing act - promising a return to high-minded tolerance
while executing mentally ill prisoners in Arkansas, for example - was
lauded as a brilliant synthesising of traditional liberal ideology with
the political realities of the modern age.
The alert among you
will have noticed by now that what all these spiritually uplifting
leaders have in common. They are all Democrats. Never in any of the
chapters of this hagiography does a Republican, a conservative, appear
in a remotely similar light. These alien creatures by contrast have
always been portrayed as cartoonish representatives of the Dark Side of
humanity, or, if they were really lucky, simply idiots, failed B-movie
actors and irredeemably ignorant hicks with embarrassingly neanderthal
views on women, religion and communism.
It's been a while
coming - neither Al Gore in 2000 (before the luminescence created by
his recent joint Nobel/Oscar triumphs) nor John Kerry in 2004 quite fit
the bill. But it's fairly clear now that, with the near-certain
nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for
the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of
hero-worship since Elvis Presley.
You will not see a finer
example of the genre than the cover story of this week's Newsweek,
which was entitled "The O Team". This rhapsodic inside account of
Senator Obama's campaign reads a little like a cross between Fr Alban
Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim
Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.
Mr
Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not
human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is always
eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling
confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high
principles, and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral politics.
I stopped reading after a while but I'm sure by the end he was healing
the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the blind and
setting prisoners free.
The panegyric included the now
conventional wisdom in the media that Republicans have only ever won
elections in the past 40 years through lies and fearmongering -
smearing their opponents and spreading false fears that a vote for a
Democrat would open the country to foreign invasion.
To be
fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most shameless
phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV channels
prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers worship at the
altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for the election
between Senator Obama and John McCain in November - the Second Coming
versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up against the
Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona.
There's a special irony
here. Senator McCain is the Republican who has received probably the
single most favourable treatment from the media in the past 40 years.
He has been a favourite because he conformed to the first law of
contemporary political journalism: the only good conservative is a bad
conservative. His willingness to defy his party on everything from
taxes to global warming, to take on George Bush, has earned him at
least an honourable mention in the martyrology of American politics of
the last 40 years.
But now that he's up against Oh! Bama! he
will have to be recast in the more familiar Republican mould of villain
and scaremonger-in-chief.
This media narrative is not only an
outgrowth of the journalists' natural enthusiasm for a Democrat such as
Mr Obama. It is a clever ploy to pre-emptively de-legitimise any
Republican critique of the Democratic nominee. It is designed to
prevent Mr McCain from asking reasonable questions about Mr Obama's
strikingly vacuous political background, or raising doubts about his
credentials for the presidency.
The idolatry of Mr Obama is a
shame, really. The Illinois senator is indeed, an unusually talented,
inspiring and charismatic figure. His very ethnicity offers an exciting
departure. But he is not a saint. He is a smart and eloquent man with a
personal history that is startlingly shallow set against the scale of
the office he seeks to hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary,
to scrutinise his past and infer what it might tell us about his
beliefs, in the absence of the normal record of achievement expected in
a presidential nominee.
If the last 40 years have taught us
anything they have surely taught that premature canonisation is an
almost certain guarantee of subsequent deep disappointment.