Newark Mayor Cory Booker. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)
There is a disease spreading across our political punditry, and the
beloved mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, seems to have contracted it. On
Sunday’s
Meet The Press, Booker
disavowed
the new ad campaign attacking Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, and
in doing so, compared the Obama team’s decision to air the ads to the
right-wing invocation of Reverend Wright to take down the president.
Booker released a
retraction video
hours later, but the incident indicates just how advanced the sickness
of false equivalence is in our national dialogue. The plague has now
infected a normally sharp public official unlikely to confuse a thinly
veiled racist play against the first African-American president with an
examination of the economic track record of his challenger.
I’m as much a Cory Booker fan as the next populist progressive. I’ve watched with bemusement as his social media
presence has made him a superhero, able to
plow driveways in biblical snow storms and
tweeting
as he goes door to door during hurricanes to protect his constituents.
His larger-than-life persona went stratospheric last month when he
rushed into a burning building to save a woman trapped by the flames.
But Cory, while you had me at your first hashtag, you lost me yesterday
when you uttered
these words:
“This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides,”
[Booker] said on Meet the Press. “It’s nauseating to the American
public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking
Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop.”
In an effort to appear objective in a political climate anything but,
talking heads now feel the need to utter a Democratic offense in the
same breath as a Republican offense. But I’ve got news for them: when
the offenses don’t line up—as they often don’t these days—these folks
don’t sound objective, they sound like lunatics.
Mitt Romney is running as CEO-in-chief of a country starved for jobs.
His economic record is central to his candidacy by his own design. The
ads in question
feature workers from factories destroyed by Bain Capital challenging
Romney’s model for job creation. In an election where the economy and
jobs lead voters’ concerns by
double digits,
a candidate’s history as an industrial titan is not only germane but
crucial to decision-making. Obama’s team are hardly the first people to
think so;
Winning Our Future, the Sheldon Adelson–backed Super PAC, launched the mini-documentary
King of Bain, widely credited with helping win the South Carolina primary for Gingrich.
This line of inquisition simply does not equate to using a preacher’s
old inflammatory statements as an attack on the president’s patriotism.
Even the previous
Republican challenger understood the immorality of stoking racism as a path to the Oval Office.
But unchallenged false equivalence in our media and from our politicians is at epidemic proportions. A few cases in point:
In March, after the release of Game Change—the movie
depicting the train wreck that Sarah Palin made of the McCain campaign
in 2008—McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt defended himself on Morning Joe
by claiming that both parties choose unqualified candidates for vice
president. He compared John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards as vice
president in 2004 to McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, saying both were
ill-suited to run the country. Schmidt is a Republican operative with
self-interest in playing down the Palin decision, so we might forgive
him the transgression. But NBC Chief Correspondent Andrea Mitchell—guest
on the same show and the epitome of establishment media—was quick to
affirm Schmidt’s assessments of the two candidates. Not a single guest
made the obvious point that Edwards was a respected senator with
thoroughly vetted policy positions whose character flaws would not be
revealed until years later. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was
virtually unknown and her lack of knowledge on even basic policy issues
would have become clear in the most basic interview of a rigorous
vetting process.
Earlier this month, one of Politico’s premiere political reporters, Manu Raju, stated in an article
about Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s frustration over gridlock in
the Senate that the filibuster is a tool that has been employed with
growing frequency by both parties over the years. Raju’s history book
seems to begin in 2009 when the threat of filibusters by the Republicans
shot up to more than double that of their Democratic counterparts in previous years.
More insidious is the February column by Washington Post
analyst Ezra Klein that claimed that “politically motivated” shifts on
issues by both parties undercut any ideological meaning of “left” and
“right.” By making this sweeping conclusion, Klein ignores the body of
evidence that shows distinctly different motivations for the examples he
uses. Democrats have consistently shifted position in an effort to
compromise with Republicans—being lambasted by their base for doing
so—and move legislation forward. Republicans have shifted position to
stake out increasingly extreme positions that will drive government out
of business. In conflating the two, Klein misinforms readers about the
nature of the political dysfunction in our country and makes it that
much harder to fix it.
The problem of false equivalence is so rife in our country that the president dedicated a
chunk of his speech at the Associated Press
luncheon
in April to the issue. While it doesn’t rank explicitly on the list of
voter concerns, this habit contributes to the high rates of
American distrust
in the news media. The American people are smart enough to know when a
commentator or anchor holds an opinion and forgiving when this is made
apparent. Attempts to cover up personal bias with false equivalence does
not make one objective, but it does make one complicit in obscuring the
dynamics of that lead to political gridlock and an unresponsive
democracy. I’d expect Cory Booker, who’s built his entire political
career on being responsive, to be immune to such an affliction.
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