One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the "center" in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his "triangulation" proved once and for all that successful Democrats move to the right.

There are several reasons this is nonsense--Clinton was more or less the original DLC "New Democrat," so he was consciously and conspicuously to the right of the party base all along. The press wanted to nudge him even further to the right. The idea that Obama should finally break with the left is equally nonsensical, since he's been happy to cross the base for two years.

It's telling that some of the strongest support for Obama's tax compromise has come from right-wing columnists and Guardians of the Political Center like David Broder. Broder's Post colleague Dana Milbank joined that crowd over the weekend, writing (12/12/10):

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of President Obama.

I'm not particularly proud of the tax-cut deal he and the Republicans negotiated. But I'm proud that he has finally stood firm against the likes of Peter DeFazio.

It's not the policy, then--it's the fact that Obama stood up to a "hard-core liberal." Apparently Obama has been letting such Democrats control his policy decisions so far, "to his peril over the past two years." This was what doomed the healthcare debate, according to Milbank--Obama let liberals waste time supporting the public option. Paul Krugman responds:

The debate over the public option wasn't what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican "moderates" weren't negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.

That media mythology is deep. This weekend, NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory wondered:

You know, Harold, the question was, was this a Sister Souljah moment, to go back to the Clinton era, for President Obama, standing up to the base?

Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment" came before he was even president--a poor example of a chastened president moving to the "middle."  But that timeline is mostly forgotten--as are Clinton's other moves to the right, many of which came before the 1994 midterms.

Even stories that try to knock down the Clinton/Obama comparison-- like Peter Baker's Week in Review article in the New York Times (12/12/10)--wind up having to play along with the storyline. As Baker noted about Clinton's surprise appearance at a White House press conference:

Equally riveting and astonishing, Mr. Clinton's blast-from-the-past performance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon reinforced the impression of political déjà vu, the sense that once again a Democratic president humbled by midterm elections was pivoting to the center at the expense of his own supporters.

Baker goes on to explain why the comparison misses the mark, but it's telling that this history lesson is the exception in the media and not the rule. Apparently there is something irresistible about moving Democrats even further to the right.

Here's the sentence that sums up what was wrong with election coverage '10, courtesy of the New York Times' Peter Baker (11/3/10):

Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government?

Clearly, the economy was the main thing on the minds of American citizens, and we needed the media to lead a serious discussion of what to do about it. Instead, we got a bogus debate in which the left-wing pole was that nothing could be done to improve the situation--when the actual progressive view was that a great deal more could have been done--and the right offered an attack on federal spending but was never required to offer a coherent explanation of how this eliminated jobs.  This is a framing that the right could not help but win by default.

One strand of conventional wisdom among elite D.C. reporters is that losing the midterm elections would be a good thing for the White House. Hence New York Times reporter Peter Baker (10/24/10):

WASHINGTON — Let there be no mistake: President Obama wants the Democrats to win next week's midterm elections. His voice has gone hoarse telling every audience that from Delaware to Oregon. But let's also acknowledge this: Although he will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if they lose.

The reality of presidential politics is that it helps to have an enemy.

I have to think that people who don't live in the Beltway bubble, but who do nonetheless follow politics pretty closely, would find it strange to think that the Republican minority does not currently fill the role of Obama's "enemy." Though Baker's notion of an enemy is pretty flexible; he suggests that Obama might be able to "forge agreements with Republicans on issues like the economy, energy and education" after the Democrats lose--i.e., moving far enough to the right that he would be pursuing policies that Republicans would be likely to support.

This suggestion is taken to the extreme by the Dean of the D.C. Press, the Washington Post's David Broder, who wrote a whole column (10/24/10) admiring the deep austerity measures being adopted in Britain. Massive spending cuts and the slashing of government payroll? If only it could happen here! And the surest route would be for Republicans to win big next Tuesday, which would bring us some sort of bipartisan Nirvana:

The American political system virtually precludes the possibility of a coalition government. But the midterm elections provide the opportunity for a similar breakthrough.

If Republicans emerge next month with sufficient leverage in the House and Senate to approach Obama with a proposition, they could insist that he "do a Cameron" when it comes to federal spending: a radical rollback now in the welfare state in return for a two-year truce on such policy questions as repeal of the healthcare law.

The vehicle could well be Obama's strong endorsement of the December 1 report from his fiscal responsibility commission, which is expected to emphasize spending discipline over raising revenue. This would offer major gains to both parties, and set the stage for another experiment in the British model.

By the accounts of credible economists (New York Times, 10/22/10; Guardian, 10/25/10), Britain's plan to slash spending and raise taxes in the midst of a deep downturn is a recipe for economic disaster. If the U.S. political system makes it difficult to follow in British footsteps, that's one thing to be said for the U.S. political system.

A New York Times article (4/23/10) by Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn remarks of Barack Obama:

With his poll numbers sagging, the choreographed confrontation seemed aimed at tapping the nation’s antiestablishment mood as well as muscling financial regulation legislation through Congress.

While Obama's confrontation with the financial industry was no doubt choreographed, are his poll numbers really sagging?

This chart from Pollster.com, averaging out all the major national polls, reveals instead that opinion on Obama's job performance is remarkably steady (and remarkably evenly divided, too).

It's hard to turn a line like that into exciting news, which isn't to say that the people who write press releases for polling firms can't try.  The Monkey Cage blog (4/21/10; via Yglesias, 4/21/10) noted a release from Quinnipiac that began:

President Barack Obama’s job approval, which bounced slightly to a 45-46 percent split March 25 in the wake of his healthcare victory, has flattened out at 44-46 percent, his lowest approval rating since his inauguration, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

The approval ratings since the beginning of this year on which Quinnipiac based this exciting tale: 45, 45, 46, 45, 44. The margin of error of these polls: +/- 2.2 percentage points.

In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama's Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media:

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America’s involvement.

Newspapers are filled with what now? It doesn't feel that way to me, but surely Baker must have some evidence. Which he does:

The cover of the latest Economist is headlined "Afghanistan: The Growing Threat of Failure."

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in the New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

A British magazine and a Times op-ed from someone who supports the war? That's not exactly what I was expecting when I was told newspapers were "filled" with dissenting views.

Under the headline "Future Nominations Are at Stake in Hearing," New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Charlie Savage suggested that Sonia Sotomayor's nomination is a given; the real battle among partisans and legal activists is "to define the parameters of an acceptable nomination in case another seat opens up during Mr. Obama’s presidency." Interesting, then, to see what the parameters of debate are like in this report.

The Times solicits comments from five conservatives or Republicans--Rachel Brand, Fred McClure, James R. Copland, Manuel Miranda and Kenneth M. Duberstein. The Times also quoted one law professor with a liberal reputation who has been a forceful critic of Sotomayor (suggesting she was intellectually unqualified for the court), and Nan Aron "of the liberal Alliance for Justice."

The piece goes on to say, "Several legal experts said Judge Sotomayor’s testimony might make it harder for Mr. Obama to name a more liberal justice next time." Well, if you talk to that many right-wingers, you will hear that kind of thing quite a bit.

The New York Times' Peter Baker reports today (3/18/09) that Obama has tapped "a Swahili-speaking retired Air Force officer who grew up in Africa as the son of missionaries" to be his special envoy to Sudan.

Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don't speak Swahili in Sudan? It's like reporting that Obama appointed a French-speaking envoy to Germany, and meaning it in a flattering way. Sure, they don't speak French in Germany, but they're both in Europe, right?

Baker also writes:

The latest crisis began March 4, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague charged Mr. Bashir with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the slaughter of 300,000 people in Darfur, the first such indictment of a sitting head of state by the tribunal.

But Baker is conflating violent and non-violent deaths. The ICC prosecutor only accuses Bashir of causing 35,000 violent deaths; the rest (there's no exact count, but most estimates put them at over 200,000) have died of war-related causes like disease and hunger. And most of the victims died in the first few years of the war; humanitarian aid succeeded in dramatically reducing death rates in Darfur to the point that they were "far below the emergency thresholds."

Deaths are deaths, but it's important to make that distinction between violent and non-violent deaths, particularly in the context of a piece that gives a lot of ink to Obama critics who long for the days when Clinton called for a no-fly zone over Darfur and Susan Rice pushed for urgent military planning to "stop the dying." The piece closes with the executive director of the Enough Project asking whether Obama would "force" Bashir to let humanitarian aid groups back in or simply "accept talking about the situation and seeing if that's enough."

When you understand that the dying had been dramatically reduced using diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and when you understand that the attempt at "forcing" via an ICC indictment led to the explusion of much of that humanitarian aid, you might reevaluate the idea that "talking" is less desirable than "forcing."

Jane Kim of CJR.org (3/9/09) quotes some of the reactions to a New York Times reporter asking Barack Obama if he is "a socialist as some people have suggested": Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cracks that "the New York Times was THAT CLOSE to a journalistic coup!" and American Prospect's Ezra Klein wants to know, "Did they really think he would slip and admit that his stimulus plan was cadged from a footnote in Das Kapital?"

NYT reporter Peter Baker defended the question to Greg Sargent: "We were…interested in exploring how a new president defines his political philosophy, something that has been the subject of intense debate." That would explain, to some extent, why the Times also chose to ask Obama: "Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?"

If it’s one-word, yes/no answers that we're looking for, I've got a question that might elicit one: Is the discussion of whether Obama's economic policies signify a shift in our country's guiding political framework at all advanced by a simplistic "So, are ya?" query from the New York Times?

Admitting that "being direct can be effective sometimes," Kim still thinks "it's a shame that the Times chose to employ the Are you this? Are you that? questioning technique," because "in this case... the questions weren't nuanced enough to lift the discussion up and away from political ass-covering."