Media Criticism

While the Democrats and Republicans focus their attention on Iowa and New Hampshire, both national parties are contending with issues of scheduling. The Democratic Party seems to be victimizing itself at every turn by adhering to the ridiculous legal mandates within Iowa and New Hampshire state law dictating their place in the primary process. DNC Chairman Howard Dean and others have indicated that Florida and other states will not have any delegates at the national convention next summer if they hold their primary ahead of the party’s schedule. Candidates are signing pledges not to campaign in Florida, Michigan and other states in order to provide legitimacy to their primary efforts.

Howard Dean may think that he is establishing discipline but the DNC and the RNC aren’t legal bodies. Political parties are organizational tools established at the will of the people to help define (or divide, depending on your perspective) political thought. If states want to pass laws that move their primaries to Christmas, the Democrats need to recognize the legal reality. I am not a fan of Iowa and New Hampshire acting as the initial political determinants for the presidential campaign but their legislatures are autonomous from the ideas of political parties.

The Democrats will suffer greatly if they persist with the policy of keeping delegates of violating states out of the convention. Democratic activists feel that 2008 is a slam dunk but the party has screwed up in the past (just look at the 2004 convention when they played patty cake with President Bush). An article in Salon today points out the frustration of activists in Florida which may lead them to sit out the presidential primaries or choose a Republican candidate in November 2008. Dean’s image as the grassroots hero, cultivated in 2004 and in his 50 state campaign of 2006, is greatly damaged by his bureaucratic overreaching.

We have too many problems in America to allow the national party committees to derail the political process. Future problems with Iran, Social Security, health care and dozens of other issues mean that the Democrats and Republicans need to allow the primary process to happen organically. If voters dislike the process, they can speak with their state legislators and vote out legislators that support an acceleration of state primaries in the next election. The DNC and RNC need to begin planning their conventions and laminating passes and allow politics to play out amongst the states.

Any good politician thinks about their short term prospects especially during an active campaign. If John Kerry had said he was building the Democratic Party for 2008 while running for president in 2004, he would have been creamed at the polls. Many politicians simply fail to realize that their place in politics is to compact the snow that will eventually become a massive snowball. Ron Paul fits into this camp with his grassroots campaign in 2008.

I think that Ron Paul has been receiving enough attention in the press based on the competition in the Republican field. There are plenty of candidates beyond Romney and Giuliani so why should Paul get more attention? The media has only begun to realize that Paul’s campaign is different from that of other candidates in the Republican AND Democratic fields. The problem for Ron Paul is that the media won’t help him in the short term. Ron Paul stories revolve around the shock of the candidate actually beating people financially on a quarterly basis. His aim should be a reform of the Republican Party back to roots laid down by people like Bob Taft in the 1940s: isolationist and libertarian.

His platform is appealing to Americans frustrated with the Bush Administration’s love affair with bureaucracy. Bush is not a traditional Republican but a tinkerer that benefited from a terrible attack on American soil six years ago. Paul would reorganize and decrease the size of government, recommit the country to the gold standard and draw back our influence in the world to reflect concerns over domestic defense. I think the gold standard idea is unrealistic in the modern economy but everything else sounds great to me. The problem is that as much as the American people complain about big government and overreaching presidents they are used to these malformed institutions.

Ron Paul will continue to gain supporters as the Republican debates continue into the primary season. Fred Thompson is a Reagan conservative that fails to realize that the Cold War is over, Mitt Romney is a stuffed suit and Rudy Giuliani is not desirable to a) conservatives, b) religious conservatives and c) libertarians. The problem is that Ron Paul does not fit the ridiculous form that we apply to each president. His frank manner is great to distinguish him in debates but Americans find it difficult to support people that speak common sense to power.

Since a reformed Republican party seems unlikely in the next generation, I am hoping that Ron Paul leaves the Republican Party and takes the mantle of the Libertarian Party in 2008. The major problem for parties like the Libertarian Party is that they get little press. If Paul is able to accomplish anything in the early primaries, he can bolt the party once partisan drones chose their leader. He will have run ads in the early primary states, built a following among independents and gotten his name in every major newspaper for months before the primaries even start. I hope that someone emerges from the Democrats to run as an independent to throw the two-party system into array and show Americans how fundamentally flawed our system is.

Anyone that watched the lies and fabrications of Colin Powell as he presented the case for intervention in Iraq in 2003 is concerned with Western rhetoric about Iran. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and other elements of conservatism in Iran have been accused of developing nuclear capabilities, consorting with Syria to intervene in Iraq and plotting the destruction of Israel. All three of these have truth to them, in particular the anti-Semitism of the Iranian elites but every decision regarding Iran will be colored with the brush of Iraq’s failures.

As a student editorial writer in college, I devoted several articles to my opposition to the war in Iraq in the winter of 2003. I think that a war with Iran would be better justified than the war in Iraq but we are already over-committed in Iraq and under-committed in Afghanistan. We have cast our lot in the Middle East by attempting to nation build in Iraq where the military threat was minimal. It is impossible now to fight in Iran without making a choice: push the nation into mandatory service to mobilize soldiers for Iran or pull everything out of Iraq to deal with Iran. Neither option is palatable but don’t worry, the Bush administration will find a way to make a choice that will please no one

While the geopolitical issues inherent in an Iranian war are obvious, there is something more basic that lies at the bottom of the conversation about war. Rep. Dennis Kucinich has been sounding the call for the House and the Senate to cut funds to the war in a demonstration of Congressional power. His rhetoric is more about promoting peace through one of the most powerful countries (for now) in the world. The Bush Administration is countering with a tired continuation of an amorphous war on terror that claims to have protected America from a 9/11-style attack in the last seven years. There is no reason for terrorists to attack us again because they have already gotten what they wanted. American involvement in the Middle East creates chaos, allows petty dictators to rise in the region and ensures a future filled with conflict over one of the world’s scarcest resources.

In the end, I see America going to war with Iran. Hillary Clinton is a poor person’s Republican trying to win the Democratic nomination to get the right label. Conservatives will disagree with me on Clinton’s conservatism but she certainly speaks like a hawk that is concerned with the same issues at Giuliani and Romney. I will never vote for Hillary Clinton for this reason but millions will. I just hope Americans know what they are getting into with either of the front runners in this race. I will cast my lot with someone concerned with the Constitution and the even division of powers in our government whoever that may be.

The Christian right in the tangible form of the Council for National Policy met over the weekend to discuss the state of the conservative politics in America. Anyone that has followed the Republican presidential debates understands the quandary faced by earnest conservatives. Mitt Romney is a pretty face and loaded financially but the Democratic media machine would certainly use the “flip flop” attack on Romney in a general election (to good effect). Rudy Giuliani’s run for the presidency brings forth the pain of 9/11 and his inexperience in national politics only seems to be overmatched by his moderate leanings.

The Council for National Policy put out a statement indicating their worries about a Giuliani campaign by stating that they may find it necessary to run a third party candidate. Newt Gingrich has recently declined to run for the Republican nomination but he would seem a likely candidate given his recent attacks on partisanship. Other possibilities include Chuck Hagel from Nebraska and Ron Paul from Texas if they feel like Paul’s momentum would have an effect.

In the same way that the movement of liberal Democrats into Ralph Nader’s camp in 2000 threw the election into turmoil, a Christian right candidate outside of the Republican Party in 2008 would certainly give America a Democratic president. The Republican Party would experience a split in its ranks that it has not experienced in a long time (Reagan and Ford in 1976 or even Taft and Roosevelt in 1912 beyond that). If the Republican Party wants to maintain its conservative principles and avoid kowtowing further to the Christian right, they should stand by their principles and nominate someone to lead the Republican Party instead of the American Christian right.

The confrontation between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George W. Bush on Tuesday was something that battle rappers and high school debate teams should watch in equal measure. Both presidents gave speeches several hours apart and Bush attended meetings in order to get out of seeing Ahmadinejad’s speech. Bush spoke about the authoritarian and dictatorial governments throughout the world including Cuba, Zimbabwe and a nation that starts with I and ends with ran.

Ahmadinejad was slightly more subtle than George W. Bush which proves that he is a bit of a buffoon in his own right. Anyone should be more subtle than Bush and Ahmadinejad’s speech was something to behold. He describes an occupying force that does not admit defeat, allows thousands of deaths and devalues the independence of other nations. I wonder which occupying force in the Middle East he could be referring to?

The United Nations offers a distinct opportunity for tyrants and democrats alike to speak to a global audience. America has always been hostile to the United Nations because a) it has no muscle and b) arguments going back to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations indicate a hint of racism underneath political arguments. Americans do not have a right to tell the world who they can hear speak in the United Nations because it is not OUR organization. People can protest all they want but Ahmadinejad spoke, the Cubans left after Bush’s rhetorical attack and representatives from brutal dictatorships took these attacks in stride. While the arguments between Bush and Ahmadinejad were superficial and full of bile, they do show the value of open debate. You can take what you will from that statement but if we want to spread democracy to the world (like Wilson), we need to be prepared for the bruises, cuts and psychological damage associated.

President Bush today spoke about the continuation of the Iraq war in no uncertain terms: he plans to stay the course until September, when General Petraeus reports on the situation. This is also when the funding bill for the war is up for renewal, and the only thing more important to President Bush than political progress in Iraq is political progress here at home. He has been facing opposition from Democrats for awhile now, but high-profile Republicans are beginning to break rank. The war position is no longer tenable, and Americans want us out.

What’s interesting to note from today’s Reuters article regarding the war is the amount of unopposed anti-war speech that is quoted. Remember, many of those who are publicly coming out against the war voted for it in the first place. Additionally, until now, these leaders have been quietly voting to continue funding the Iraq war as it is being conducted. Why? The political fallout for supporting the war was less than the fallout for voting against funding the troops. Now, however, the tide has turned.

One year ago, it would have been detrimental for a candidate to be strongly anti-war. Now, congressional and presidential candidates alike are trying to get their anti-war statements into the paper. There’s nothing the journalism business likes more than seeing a president backed into a corner, and with all-time low approval ratings and all-time high anti-war sentiment, it’s not likely we’ll see the Iraq story anywhere but the front page.

In this case, the interests of the media and the interests of the American public are working together. People are hungry to read about the next move in Iraq which, in turn, keeps the issue prominent in the world of journalism. Sensationalism is serving us well today.