Center-Right Country? Center-Right Media
10/19/2008 by Jim Naureckas"America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril," Newsweek declares above a piece by Jon Meacham for the October 27 issue of the magazine. As Rick Perlstein observes in a dissenting passage in the article, it's a difficult case to make from opinion polling; on contentious issues like healthcare, progressive taxation and the war in Iraq, strong majorities of the public take progressive postions, and even on hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage, the electorate is basically split.
So Meacham falls back on the results of national elections, which are not exactly direct expressions of popular opinion. But even here Meacham is guilty of serious cherry-picking:
Republicans have dominated presidential politics--in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast--for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label.
From this, Meacham concludes that "Republicans tend to win the White House" and "an Obama presidency would be one of the few exceptions to a 40-year-old historical rule." But surely, looking back on presidential elections over the past 64 years, the most obvious pattern is that each major party tends to hold the presidency for eight years at time; the one exception since 1944 came in 1980, when Jimmy Carter failed to win re-election and Republicans subsequently got three terms in a row; other than that, it's been even-steven since Harry Truman's first term.
And while the presidential vote may be more "personal" and "visceral," the House of Representatives vote probably reflects public opinion most closely--and Democrats have controlled the House for 28 of Meacham's 40 years. (That's the same percentage that Republicans have held the White House.) Clearly, you can't equate Democrats with progressives, but at the same time, a serious look at elections doesn't provide much evidence for Meacham's center-right slant.
So what Meacham's left with, essentially, is his historical intuition that "we are at heart a right-leaning country skeptical of government once a crisis that requires government has passed." And when you're talking about a writer who includes FDR as one of those Democratic presidents who "[wound] up moving farther right than they thought they ever would," and lumps Thomas Jefferson in with David Brooks and Sarah Palin as people who "who value custom over change" and "dislike those who appear condescending about matters of faith"--that's not much to go on.
Update: Here's David Sirota's take on the Meacham piece.
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October 20th, 2008 at 10:22 am
[...] should be noted that Jon Meacham's Newsweek cover story--dissected here--is matched in the magazine by a "Counterpoint" from columnist Jonathan Alter. It's instructive to [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Of course, the Republicans didn't really win the presidency in 2000 and 2004, did they?
And they won't "win" this year, unless they're able to hijack the election again.
That the Democrats didn't raise holy hell about that, and what's happening this time, shows the contempt they have for democracy.
The Republicans are scared shirtless about the race and age demographics of a truly representative electorate.
And so are their "rivals". Vote for us … if you can … but we'll keep the party in the hands of those who have sold you out at every available opportunity.
Hey, that's our job in this system. We're the good cops …
But we're still cops.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
[...] FAIR Blog: "Center-Right Country? Center-Right Media" (10/19/08) by Jim [...]
November 25th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
[...] actually been an article of faith among the gasbags for a very long time": Until recently, what they proclaimed (without qualification) was that this was a "conservative country." The election of a Democrat with [...]
December 4th, 2008 at 8:28 am
[...] pushback, and it's already happening. Even the Meacham piece in Newsweek felt constrained to include a counterpoint from historian (and fellow U of C alum) Rick Perlstein, pointing to the social science data [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 12:45 pm
[...] with much of what Timothy Egan has to say in his recent New York Times blog post (1/20/10), but I'm tired of hearing this: Democrats have to govern in a country that is essentially [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 4:01 pm
[...] of what Timothy Egan has to say in his recent New York Times blog post (1/20/10), but I'm tired of hearing this: Democrats have to govern in a country that is essentially [...]
March 10th, 2010 at 11:42 am
[...] for the retiring Bill Moyers and the canceled Now series will be headed by Newsweek editor Jon "Center-Right Nation" Meacham. To learn more or to send a message to PBS ombud Michael Getler, click here. Feel free to [...]
March 10th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
[...] for the retiring Bill Moyers and the canceled Now series will be headed by Newsweek editor Jon "Center-Right Nation" Meacham. To learn more or to send a message to PBS ombud Michael Getler, click here. Feel free to [...]
March 10th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Replacing Bill Moyers with Jon Meacham is the most irresponsible, asinine, offensive dump and switch since the Smothers Brothers Show was replaced with Hee-Haw. And the person who decided to make the switch is probably not capable of uttering any sound other than hee-haw when he/she opens their mouth.