Blood Sport

In the stories before and certainly the stories after the latest debate among Democratic candidates, the media was vampirish in its desire for blood, specifically Hillary Clinton's. But that the debate itself got nasty was by design, not by the candidates, but by MSNBC, and specifically the twisted beady-eyed ferret, so-called moderator Tim Russert. He led the assault, which was notable for its focus on Senator Clinton; otherwise it was his usual accusatory questioning on about the level of a high school sophomore debater with limited intelligence but an instinct for the jugular. He's perversely entertaining, as we watch him try to make politicians sweat, and as we wait for him to lose it on camera, perhaps begin snarling and chewing on his own claws.

This debate was clearly part of a continuous narrative, begun with TV pundits and their more competitively-alarmed print counterparts (although these days they are often the same guys) and perhaps for the first time carried through deliberately by the so-called "moderator" in the debate itself. This is the final payoff of the switch from candidate debates being sponsored by the likes of the League of Women Voters--non-partisan, issue-oriented, public-spirited--to sponsorship by interest groups and especially by the media itself, in this case MSNBC. They are transforming a fitfully informative forum that explores candidate's positions and allows voters to see and hear the candidates answer questions, to a TV "reality" show. Who will get voted off the island, and who will do what despicable act to gain the advantage? For what those shows are all about is blood sport.

Hillary Clinton is not my candidate, at least not yet. I also don't fault the other candidates for what they said, when they were drawing specific distinctions with her positions, or even when they were pointing out possible problems with her as a candidate. In fact, I thought almost all the candidates were sharper in this debate, in expressing their own points of view. That so much was focused on Hillary was partly foisted on them.

MSNBC evidently decided that because the polls say Hillary is the frontrunner, she was to receive more of the attention than anyone else, followed by Obama and Edwards. And she was to be the prime target for the ferret attacks. Those are judgments new to the debate format, and we'd better notice them. And notice their function: to increase conflict and get a little violence into prime time, which is normally when MSNBC likes to turn America's prisons into entertainment.The TV networks make enormous amounts of money from presidential campaigns. They need to juice up the conflict, so they can dangle the audience numbers before the candidates, and continue to reap those millions, the lion's share of political contributions that prostitute the candidates and the electoral system.

The result is to twist the campaign into a sham that is harmful to the process and the country, and our shared future. By emphasizing violent conflict, they emphasize the supposed necessities of violent behavior in a president. They call it toughness but what they really are promoting is violence.Ironically, this works to the ultimate advantage of Hillary, whose campaign is apparently predicated on "strength," and to the detriment of Barack Obama, who is trying to bring some sanity back to the political dialogue, instead of this bipolar insanity over strength v. weakness, and stereotyping everyone as one or the other. In the New York Times blog on the debate, Katharine Seelye actually wrote these sentences about Senator Obama: "he has an amiable quality about him that seems to resist the whole messy business. That might raise questions about how tough he would be in the Oval Office."

That's insane, and dangerously so. There is no other support for this allegation. But it is also typical of the after-debate swarm. Obama talked in the debate about how "we are all in this together" and how we must turn away from "the politics of fear." Indeed, the NY Times columnist Paul Krugman just lambasted Republican candidates for engaging in that very thing. But the media wants to see Obama's 'killer instinct,' his willingness to attack--not his willingness to draw distinctions, to show where and why he disagrees, but to 'take a shot' at Hillary.

This is the kind of bloodlust bullshit that made it so easy for the Bushites to lie us into what may well turn out to be the war that most threatens our future of any in our history. It's no small thing--it's the culture of violence that makes violence, including torture and the antiseptic discussion of mass violence by airplanes and missiles, so acceptable, and so easy to do.

Finally, it is a dangerous mood to encourage in a campaign that is bound to touch on sensitivities and prejudices. I don't mean to pick on the Times, for their coverage is merely characteristic, but I select this metaphor to caution against this way of speaking about a process of deciding on our leadership and our future: In discussing Senator Obama's interview with the Times in which he drew distinctions between himself and Hillary, Adam Nagourney wrote that viewers should "watch for" whether Obama would repeat these statements in the debate. His metaphor was this: "Will he pull the trigger? "

I remember when someone did pull the trigger on a presidential candidate. His name was Sirhan Sirhan, and the candidate was Robert Kennedy. It was 1968, months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the period that saw Malcolm X gunned down, and George Wallace crippled by a bullet. It was a violent time, and a time of violent language. Robert Kennedy was trying to change that. Someone pulled the trigger on him, and our nation has suffered ever since. The time to think about that is now, before it happens again.