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Times Watch for July 7, 2003

Democrats Are Too Good for the World

“Temperament Wars,” James Traub’s Sunday piece for the New York Times Magazine, is the latest self-righteous argument that Democrats -- get this -- are simply too nice to compete in today’s political world.

     Contributing writer Traub opines: “Some time very soon, President George Bush is expected to sign a $400 billion bill adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare -- and he is sure to be flanked not only by Republicans but also by Democrats, perhaps including that arch-liberal, Senator Ted Kennedy. It's an image that is apt to drive former President Bill Clinton around the bend. The Democrats have, in effect, agreed to hand to Bush precisely the kind of politically precious legislative victory on health care that the Republicans went to any lengths to deny to Clinton back in 1994. Could it be that the Democrats are constitutionally incapable of acting as single-mindedly -- as ruthlessly, as unfairly -- as the Republicans? If so, is this the kind of Christian virtue that leads to being eaten by lions?”

     Republicans can’t win with Traub. In the past, when Republicans failed to sign on to new entitlements, the liberal Traub doubtless considered them cruel and heartless. Now that they do, he calls them “ruthless and unfair.”

     Traub continues in the poor-Democrats vein: “The difference between the two parties is not simply ideological. It is also temperamental. For all the talk about the tainted legitimacy of Bush's Supreme Court-inflected victory in the 2000 election, the Democrats have never sought to discredit Bush's presidency. Clinton, on the other hand, won fair and square, but many Republicans treated him as an illegitimate figure from the outset, and from the time of the 1994 election, which brought the Republicans to power in both houses and made Newt Gingrich speaker of the House, the G.O.P. practiced a politics of holy war that culminated in the impeachment proceedings.”     St. Clinton, of course, had nothing to do with this. Gingrich’s “holy war” just somehow ended up, inevitably, in Clinton being impeached for lying under oath.

     Democrats are just too good for this world, according to Traub: “Why are the Democrats so much more willing than the Republicans to make political sacrifices in the name of procedural fairness or of good government? Maybe Democrats are just nicer, but a more philosophical view is that liberals are committed to, are in fact bedeviled by, ideals about process that do not much preoccupy conservatives, at least contemporary ones. Liberals put their faith in such content-neutral principles as free speech, due process, participatory democracy. Is that too lofty?”

     Of course, liberals favored the recent passage of the speech-squelching campaign finance reform, and are the driving force behind campus speech codes. And you could ask judges Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas about liberal love of “due process.”

     Traub continues: “Then maybe we should say that today's liberals, unlike today's conservatives, don't believe in any particular set of ends ardently enough to blind themselves to the means they are using to achieve them. This became patent during the endgame of the 2000 election, when Al Gore refused to sanction a range of promising legal approaches and Joe Lieberman felt called upon to concede the fairness of a critical Republican claim about the validity of absentee military ballots….There are Democrats who would like the party to get down off its moral pedestal and start fighting dirty, or at least dirtier. The journalist Eric Alterman, author of ‘What Liberal Media?’ has complained that liberals need their own Fox News, their own talk radio -- their own unleashed attack dogs. Put Michael Moore behind a desk, and watch the right-wingers squeal.”

     With laughter, perhaps. Keep in mind that Michael Moore, director of “Bowling for Columbine and the best-selling left-wing screed “Stupid White Men,” is the same charming and astute fellow who predicted Bush would be out of office by Easter 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal (remember the Enron scandal?).

     Traub then reconsiders, remembering that Democrats are just too sophisticated for such tactics: “The problem is that many Democrats would squirm as well. It is just a fact that the Republicans are now the party of passionate convictions, while the Democrats are the party of grave reservations. The Democrats are essentially devoted to tempering the harm caused by the Bush administration, which is not much of an agenda at all, though it certainly makes a virtue of moderation. Ruthlessness is just not in the party's DNA.”

     Traub’s whine concludes: “We live in a culture that values brazen certainty and loud conviction, no matter how wrongheaded. Pity the Democrats, stuck with the wrong set of virtues.”

     For the rest of James Traub sob-fest for Democrats, click here.

• Eric Alterman | Bill Clinton | Conservatives | Newt Gingrich | Impeachment | Liberals | Michael Moore | James Traub

“Conservative” Communists?

Saturday’s editorial “Hong Kong’s Message of Freedom” is a welcome blast against Communist China’s attempted repression of dissent in Hong Kong. The Times is hopeful on the prospect for a freer China in the future. But the editorial falls victim to a typical liberal media tactic of figuring out who the bad guys are, then labeling them as the “conservatives.”

     Welcoming the possibility that China could become more like freer Hong Kong, the Times writes: “A year ago, such speculation would have seemed unrealistic. But now there are some tentative grounds for optimism. These center around Hu Jintao, China's new top leader. Mr. Hu is a career bureaucrat who was expected to hew closely to the repressive, conservative path charted by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. But he has shown surprising, though limited, signs of a more modern outlook and a willingness to respond to new challenges.” Odd that the same “conservatives” criticized for zealous anti-Communism turn out to be Communists themselves!

For the rest of the Times editorial on China, click here.

• China | Communism | Editorial | Labeling Bias

"WORLD ENDS, WOMEN & MINORITIES HARDEST HIT."

A gloomy Fourth of July front-pager by reporter Daniel Altman features this stack of headlines: “US Jobless Rate Increases To 6.4%, Highest in 9 Years -- 30,000 Jobs Lost In June -- Figures Defy Some Predictions of an Economic Revival -- Blacks Fare Worst.” For good measure there’s even a chart titled “Losing Ground,” which shows “Blacks have suffered a steeper rise in unemployment than whites have since March 2001, the start of the most recent recession.”

     Times Watch is reminded of Mort Sahl’s Cold War-era joke about a headline written after a nuclear Armageddon: “WORLD ENDS, WOMEN & MINORITIES HARDEST HIT.”

     After pointing out “the unemployment rate rose to 6.4 percent, the highest in nine years, and the economy lost 30,000 jobs,” Altman writes, ”Job losses occurred across almost all industries, but blacks had considerably more trouble finding work than whites. Many more people started looking for work, but the number of employed blacks shrank, while the number of employed whites grew.…Much bigger differences arose between the employment of blacks and whites. Though the survey of households is considered a rougher picture than the survey of businesses, which does not tabulate workers by race, the figures from June sent a stark message. For every four white workers added to the work force in June, the number of employed whites rose by three. But for every four black workers added to the labor force, the number with jobs slipped by three.”

     What “stark message” is Altman suggesting? He doesn’t go into detail. The whole racial subtext seems inserted into the article as a ham-handed way to suggest the Bush administration is bad for black jobseekers.

     Journalist Mickey Kaus has a rebuttal (scroll down to Friday) suggesting the news isn’t quite as bad for blacks, or whites, as Altman makes it out to be.)

For the rest of Daniel Altman’s gloomy economic analysis, click here.

• Daniel Altman | Discrimination | Economy | Race Issues | Unemployment

Democracy Can Wait --We’ve Got Taxes to Raise

In Saturday’s editorial, “Supporting Alabama’s Tax Reform,” the Times won’t let an expansion of voting rights that would benefit blacks get in the way of supporting a tax hike: “Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama set back the cause of democracy, and disappointed his state's black community, when he rejected a bill that would have restored voting rights to felons once they were out of prison. But black voters should resist calls to strike back at the governor by voting down his tax reform package this fall. The tax reform plan would be a major improvement in Alabama's highly regressive tax system, and black Alabamians would be among the greatest beneficiaries.”

For the rest of the Times editorial on Alabama taxes, click here.

• Alabama | Discrimination | Editorial | Race Issues | Taxes | Voting Rights

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org