In Right is Wrong, her spirited indictment of the Bush Administration, the mainstream media, and the conservative movement, activist-blogger-publisher Arianna Huffington accuses The Washington Post's Bob Woodward of "journalistic pointillism." She complains, "What Woodward fails to do again and again is connect the dots."
Unfortunately, the same complaint can be made against this collection of blog entries disguised as a book. I don't have any argument with Huffington's fury at Bush 43 and his administration's despicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, horrendous embrace of torture, absurd economic policies, religious fundamentalism, and on and on. Huffington does a fine job of documenting the horrors of the Bush Administration. But sadly she falls terribly short in giving the reader a way of understanding our current political malaise. Instead she just keeps piling up more outrages and railing against them-- albeit while writing with panache and getting in some fun one-liners ("And telling students about condoms is a sin, but lying about WMD is a win."). The effect is similar to reading most political blogs-- a lot of sound and fury but little understanding. It's like being stuck in an echo chamber with a clever, loud-mouthed polemicist.
At the beginning of the book, Huffington does attempt to pinpoint the origin of the frightening disease of our body politic and comes up with a favorite diagnosis of the Left and the Right: The media caused it. Her argument goes like this: "the Republican Party has been taken over by its own lunatic fringe;" "Ronald Reagan's GOP have been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh"; "Without the enabling of the traditional media--through their obsession with 'balance' and their pathological devotion to the idea that truth is always found in the middle--the radical Right would never have been able to have its ideas taken seriously."
There are multiple problems with her argument. The most glaring is that there is an enormous disconnect between the Reagan Administration and W's band of brutes. First of all Bush's economic policies (cutting taxes for the wealthy will stimulate investment and restore productivity) can be traced back to Calvin Coolidge, let alone the Great Communicator. Bush's imperial foreign war disasters have their precedents among Democratic and Republican presidents alike, going back as far as James Madison's invasion of Canada that triggered the war of 1812 and the sacking of the White House by British troops. And conservatives' success in dominating recent American political discourse can hardly be laid at the feet of NBC's recently deceased Tim Russert, Newsweek's Howard Fineman, the Post's Woodward, and their colleagues.
There is much to criticize in the mainstream media, and Huffington does a nice job documenting the fawning treatment Bush received in his run-up to the invasion of Iraq with his bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction and the like. She does not, however, even attempt to offer evidence that the media's role in this round of American war hysteria is worse than previous ones. Just to cite one example: W. Randolph Hearst's newspapers' successful campaign to push President William McKinley into the Spanish-American War in 1898 was far worse. Moreover, she fails to even try to develop the flimsy idea that the Right owes its success to the media.
The success of the conservative movement is a complex topic involving the genuine populist uprising of the Christian Right; the strategic construction of a conservative propaganda infrastructure of think-tanks, journals of opinion, and newspapers; the poverty of American political culture; and much more. Huffington's effort to blame it all on the media falls flat. It's a shame, because if the Left can find a way forward beyond winning this year's elections, it needs to understand and learn from the Right's many successes.
George Howland Jr. was a Seattle newspaper columnist and editor for many years.