[Newsbot]

<strong>Filibuster Cartoon</strong>
<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="http://www.filibustercartoons.com/archive.php?id=20071113" target="_blank">The Square Peg</a> (click to view)
<strong>Date: </strong> November 13, 2007

The conventional wisdom is that there are no \"good choices\" in the GOP primary, epsecially for religious conservatives. Hell, I even did a toon about it. <br><br> <br><br>But I\'ve never completely understood where this talking point comes from. Frankly, I think it\'s a largely media-constructed phony crisis. They have decreed who the front runners are, then they make a new story about how none of the front runners are \"good enough\" for the base. Very circular logic. <br><br> <br><br>Recent drop-out Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee are both cookie-cutter Republicans who are actually farther to the right than Bush on most issues. Why they aren\'t doing better, or taken more seriously, is beyond me. Although there are signs things could be changing for Huckabee...

[Calbeck]

I'm half convinced that both Huckabee and Brownback are out of the running because their names don't "sound presidential" and thus combined with initial low poll numbers do not impress the press.

I had a similar experience in 1998 as a balloted candidate for Governor of Arizona. As a complete political unknown, with no name recognition and no money for a significant ad campaign to raise public awareness, my poll numbers remained in the low single digits.

Because of this, I found it impossible to obtain interviews with the press despite being on the ballot. I literally walked into the offices of the Arizona Republic and other major news outlets to offer on-the-spot interviews, and was invariably told to leave my information and they'd get back to me. Which of course they never did. Which shot my plan to raise public awareness, via the press, right in the head.

Not to say I got no coverage at all; I attended numerous public debates, and even managed to impress the press several times despite their efforts to ignore me. I even got standing ovations from largely Democrat/Republican crowds on more than one occasion. At the televised debates, despite the fact that almost all the questions from the panel were directed specifically to the Democrat and Republican candidates, I managed to score loud cheering from the audience with a couple of pointedly direct interjections. But I can count the times the press did more than say the equivalent of "Scott Malcomson was also there" on the fingers of one hand.

The simple fact is, the press is not there to "inform the public". It is there to make a buck, and paying the slightest bit of attention to a candidate who is not already breaking 10% in the polls --- regardless of whether they are on the ballot or not --- is generally considered a complete waste of their time.

[CanadianJeff]

Frankly I don't think it's really the media that has done in the GDP this election nearly as much as George Bush. I just don't think it's possible to get elected very easily as a GDP candidate after the mess he's caused. It's going to take the republican party a while to regain their standing in the public becuase of Bush's actions.

Now I'm not saying the GDP is respoinsible for Bush or vise versa but one will sadly reflect the poll numbers of the other by assosiation in the public eye.

Personally I think that's more the reason why the GDP is having such a hard time.

[Psudo]

I assume you mean GOP (Grand Ol' Party, eg the Republicans) rather than GDP (Gross Domestic Product, eg the amount of money in the country).

Also, most criticism of George Bush doesn't hold nearly as much water with Republicans as it does with the rest of the country. For that reason, the Republican Party's constituents are not very likely to avoid Republican candidates due to perceptions of Bush as a bumbling devil.

[CanadianJeff]

Your quite right that I meant GOP...oopsies.

It's not the other Republican party constituents I'm so concerned with. It's the centre line and slight right people. They changed their minds in the last election and turned the senate and house over to the democrats.

Those are the people that I'm really speaking of.

[Tiler]

As was said, the sad fact is that the media in America has serious issues. Some of it is obvious, and some of it is a bit more subtle.

First off, the obvious. The media does not try to inform people. It does not try to educate people. The news media in America, and really any western nation, exists for three purposes. To (paradoxically, almost) talk about something everyone knows about (celebrities), to scare people, and to report on actual news. The modern media is very poorly equipped to deal with elections, since modern media is incapable of seeing anything past it's own bloated self. Watching the news really isn't a terribly informative experience, IMO. There's never any talk about things that seriously affect the world like the true effect policy X has on nation X, or how changing statistic in nation X may lead to a war with nation Z, or any real changing subtleties in national culture or anything. Unless, of course, you can summarize it in one terrifying headline that can be made into a scary 3-D graphic. (KILLER BEES/GLOBAL WARMING/WAR IN IRAQ). And if it's something that doesn't affect Americans? One sentence per 5 White deaths/50 Yellow deaths/500 Brown deaths/ 5000 Black deaths. And if a celebrity commits a crime? Stop the stations. Of course, newspapers are a lot less into this phenomenon than TV is, but it tends to bury uninteresting things to A17 or whatnot.

What about the subtleties? Well, we know 'what' the media does, so the next question is 'why'? And why do stations report about stupid things? Well, for one thing, a lot of people are 'stupid'. Not really dumb, but they just don't care about politics or world affairs or whatnot. They care about their life, if they're going to be fed the next day, and other things that only affect them personally. Why should they care about what the Chinese are doing? Of course, if there is something like a all out war against China, they'll start caring.

The second thing is that media networks thinks that we are all a bunch of dribbling morons. Entertainment shows think that the only sense of humor that the braindead mobs can enjoy is people getting hit on the head with coconuts. In one sense, the one I pointed out, they are right. But in another sense, they are criminally negligent in things. For example, on elections. I am willing to bet that there are documents floating out there that effectively go 'find some semi-popular people, declare them front-runners, and go with it'. Which is why you have who you have. And it gets to the point that they go out of their way to ignore those they haven't deemed as a 'front runner'. For example, love him or hate him, Ron Paul deserves a lot more attention than he's been getting. He scores bizarrely high on most polls, online and offline (about the only poll I've seen him do bad on is the 'Official' polls). He's the only Republican that is truly anti-war, and he managed to raise $4.2 Million in a single day. Million! That last thing was about the only thing that managed to win him much media coverage, despite all his weird achievements. And I see magazines like Time and Newsweek dedicating entire magazines to the life of one of the 'front-runners'. It's a sick cycle that I'd almost say 'there's a document somewhere', except there has been several pieces of evidence that point to a real media blackout of non-frontrunner candidates. It's like they friggin forgot what happened to Howard Dean after the media was already running around saying that the campaign was already over!

Hell, I'd also like to add, while I'm kinda on the subject, that the media has this bizarre, disturbing fetish with poll numbers. They're easy to read, easy to write or talk about, and require no intuitive thinking to jabber on about, so that's all they seem to go by these days. The polls numbers put out now are really nothing more than people knowing, offhand, that a candidate exists. They have impressions now, of course. Obama is fresh, Hillary is ambitious, Romney is Mormon, McCain is stale, etc., but they haven't actually had a chance to see what the heck the candidates actually stand for. A week or so before the election, people actually bother to get a good look at candidates, decide who they think would really make a good president, and then pick them.

It's a sad thing, and it makes my head hurt.

[Psudo]

CanadianJeff wrote:

It's not the other Republican party constituents I'm so concerned with. It's the centre line and slight right people. They changed their minds in the last election and turned the senate and house over to the democrats.

There was nothing to indicate that. The comic you were rebutting was about Republicans finding a candidate they wanted. And once Republicans pick a candidate, they'll rally behind him pretty well. It's a precedent set by Lincoln.

[Calbeck]

Very good points, Tiler.

From what I've been able to tell, the press pays attention to candidates mainly in terms of fundraising. Now more than ever, money "buys" elections because whoever has the most of it gets to dominate the media.

Consider Bush the Younger's 2000 run...he was up against McCain then, who had a much better record BUT who did not raise anything like the same amount of money. Bush's daddy, who served under Reagan as veep, was the tap into a huge network of Republican/conservative movers and shakers, all of whom had been royally ticked off by Clinton over the previous eight years.

So, Bush the Younger was the beneficiary of an immense windfall, setting all-time records for fundraising, and on THAT basis he was essentially coronated while McCain was brusquely told (for all intents and purposes) to get out of Bush's way.

The real mark of Bush Jr.'s non-presidentialness was the fact that Al Gore nearly beat him with a fraction of the cash Junior spent.

What has bothered me, as a lifelong independent with both liberal and conservative views, is that the Democrats have consistently failed to rise above the fray and produce a statesman for their choice of candidate. Instead, they've engaged in exactly the same kind of partisanship that they decried when Republicans went after Clinton, and in my view they've been even worse in that regard.

The result is that the process is just getting worse. Both parties have about 35%-40% of the registered voters in their proverbial pocket and for the last eight years seem to have been mainly interested in shoring up that support rather than looking to the independents for the critical swing vote. Things have settled a bit since the vitriol of 2004, but there's still a strongly simmering undercurrent of bitterness.

I'm just waiting for that bitterness to explode into yet another round of fury, as soon as both sides have decided on which candidate is going to carry their bucket of boiling oil.

[Jawajoey]

I think this comic is right on. Not really because Rudy is the man, but I really don't get why Huckabee is doing so poorly. He seems like the perfect candidate for the entire Christian Warhawk right. I very much disagree with those opinions, but he's such an obvious choice for those who share them. Yet social conservatives are trying to justify Rudy, instead. Is this a product of people being so afraid of Hillary that they'll only support the person they think has the best shot of beating her? Or is it because they're so simplistic as to only consider the top two names when choosing a candidate?

Kerry proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the anti-candidate doesn't win. Kerry, whose only positive trait was "not Bush," got a lot of support for that, but still didn't win.

It's annoying how much the media is forcing "frontrunners" on people. They handed Thompson frontrunner status on a silver platter before he entered the race, and Huckabee is relegated to second tier, despite being a candidate who is perfect for a big base.

I'm not TOO upset at how fragmented and confused the GOP is right now. I'm rooting for Ron Paul, and this GOP mess is good for him. Though the media still hasn't quite grasped that he's surpassing or on par with McCain and Tohmpson in many measures, and has easily surpassed Huckabee. And yet according to them, Huckabee is number 5 while Ron Paul would be a longshot in a race between him, Tancredo, and Hunter. Seriously people, look at what's happening, stop looking at the initial projections. If we only ever looked at predictions then USC would still be ranked #1 in college football, but instead we recently crawled back up to 11.

[Robair]

Huckabee

God help us.

[Tiler]

Robair wrote:

Huckabee

God help us.

Erugh. I hate shows like that. They pose as knowledgeable, helpful people, and pose leading questions and edit out any sort of answer and any sort of context that doesn't make whatever their target demographic is look super-duper retarded.

You could make any sort of group look like a bunch of headless chickens.

[CanadianJeff]

ok hearing someone say "Congratulations Canada on preserving your national igloo" is funny Tiler has a very very good point. This is all edited. I'm sure that if you walked up to most Canadians and said asked if they agree that the United states should stop allowing the killing of seals on it's shores you would have a good number of Canadians on camera state a very stupid pointless opinon.

It's a pretty easy thing to find one thing a person doesn't know feed them false facts and laugh at their ignorance of what you JUST taught them.

But still the fact that Bush didn't know who our prime minster was....well that's scary. I still remember him giving a big list of thank yous to all the nations that he felt were in on the "war on terror" a few weeks after 9/11. He listed off about 40 names and Canada wasn't on the list. Scary.

[JJ]

To be fair Bush never really showed that he didn't know the PM's name. He merely failed to correct someone whom he believed to be a legitimate Canadian reporter who asked him an unrelated question that only used the man's (fake) name in passing.