Sticks and Stones

Joe Klein has been banned from the McCain and Palin planes. This is, of course, of a piece with the Republican attitude towards the press: if they’re not with us, they’re against us. This is a meme that has been floating around in Republican circles for a long time. It reached its fullest flower with the pre-surge Iraq War. Republicans and conservatives in general seem to be uniquely able to convince themselves that the world is not as everyone says it is, unless there’s an R after their name.

Progressives are not immune to this problem, as well. What they do, however, is a bit more mature. Progressives believe (sometimes wrongly, often rightly) that commercial news media often prize the horserace and contrast above actually in depth reportage. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, some of them more reasonable than others. But what differentiates progressives from conservatives is a willingness to accept an external reality outside of the media and the idelogical echo chamber (blogs on the left and talk radio on the right). This is one reason why so many progressives were willing to look at evidence that contradicted the government line when Republicans and establishment Democrats were not. Republicans were disinclined to listen to Hans Blix and other European counterarguments for ideological reasons, and congressional Democrats were all-too-willing to stick with the government line for fear of seeming “weak.”

What I find so exceptional about the McCain campaign’s relationship with the press is how petty it seems. McCain seems to regard negative coverage as a personal slight. In all fairness, if I were on the receiving end of it, I probably would, too. The problem is, I’m not running for president. To react to perceived slights in the childish way he has reveals a shocking lack of maturity and character on the part of McCain’s campaign and McCain himself. This campaign has revealed a lot about McCain as a person, and it’s confirmed a lot of them mythology he’s built up about himself. He really is the flyboy, the jock and the frat brother. And, as is so often the case, he can dish it out, but he can’t take it.