The Privileged Few, they will have their say. Years ago, they ensconced one of their own, Roger Ailes, as the head of Fox News. As everyone knows, Fox News has ever since been the Pravda of the conservative right, their “fair and balanced” being no more fair and balanced than Pravda ever actually represented “truth.”
In the wake of Sen. Obama’s speech, Sean Hannity seized the occasion. He responded to Obama’s challenging speech on race by not at all dealing with race. It also ended on an astonishing note of self-adulation, but I’ll get to that later.
Hannity invited Frank Luntz to dissect the Obama speech. Luntz is a very smart man who bills himself as a pollster, even though the kinds of polls he runs are the ones designed to make people answer questions the way the pollster wants them to. (He himself has said so.) What Luntz really is, is a semantician. He’s a manipulator of language, highly in demand in the Republican party for his ability to make language bend the people to its will. But calling himself a pollster (even though he has been frequently sanctioned by polling organizations) allows him to pretend he is impartial and above the fray. In other words, calling himself a pollster is itself a semantician’s manipulation of language.
The First Absurd Salvo
Luntz’s very first critique of the Obama speech was in itself pretty astonishing:
Well, the first thing is that he read it on the telemprompter and, frankly, he didn’t read it that well. When you are in a situation where you’re being challenged, when your credibility is under attack.... Don’t ever read a teleprompter. Look at them straight in the eye.
Sounds like an interesting left-field critique, but it’s simply an attempt to diminish Obama’s vaunted oratorical skill. (Which scares the bejeebers out of his political opponents.) When one is speaking on a subject as charged as race, where time and again we have seen people make tiny off-the-cuff misstatements that have been seized upon and wrung dry (as Obama himself did with his “typical white woman” remark a couple days later), the last thing on earth you want to do is stand in front of the nation and wing it. (Wouldn’t they have just loved it if he had. Because then, then they’d have had something they could’ve worked with. Some bone they could have gnawed for months.)
Also, it seemed plain to me that Obama deliberately kept his delivery flat in order to stay away from anything that sounded, in a word, preachery. It was necessary for him to draw as a sharp a contrast as he could between his calm, measured oratory and the flights of passion that seized Rev. Wright. We know from Obama’s other speeches that he can wind up a crowd real good, but this wasn’t the time. Luntz deliberately ignores all this in order to make the false claim that Obama’s speech was (a) insincere and (b) dull.
(Of course, insincere and dull is exactly what we get every time our current president reads from the teleprompter, but let’s stick to the subject.)
But Wait, There's More
Mr. Luntz then dares the following, referring to Obama’s comment that Rev. Wright “contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad of the community that he has served”:
This is not your hairdresser. This is not the guy who does your nails. This is your pastor. This is your rabbi; this is your priest. This is a spiritual leader of a community.
In response to that, one need only say: Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson. Both of whom claimed, as Rev. Wright did, that America deserved 9/11 for its sins, except that for Falwell and Robertson those sins were liberalism and homosexuality, while for Wright the sin was slavery and racism. Pick your poison.
Luntz and Hannity then engaged in a very poorly-defined critique of this line from Obama: “I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother....” Seizing, inevitably, on the word “disown,” they said, essentially, that it was bad without ever actually saying why. Frequent cohost Kristin Powers, a Democratic Party operative, tried to weigh in, without much effect.
LUNTZ: ... Barack Obama is an outstanding communicator.... But I now follow the words that he chooses. And if you watch his speech overall, it is Kennedy-esque. But the moment that you start to look at the language—and I’ve got the text here. That word “disown”...
HANNITY: Yes.
LUNTZ: ... he’s going to pay a price for that in that he brings in his own family and tries to do that.
HANNITY: Because he stays friends when he says he doesn’t disown. He’s still friends with the guy.
POWERS: But wasn’t he talking about the...
LUNTZ: More than just friends.
POWERS: Wasn’t he talking about the complexities of people? That’s the way I heard that.
LUNTZ: You are correct. And he’s trying to explain it. But the problem is when you get to words like “disown,” it’s a rationalization. It’s a defense rather than an explanation.
Is it? Why? After all the clamor for Obama to do exactly that, to disown his pastor, now when he refuses to do so suddenly the word “disown” is really a meaningless rationalization? It’s the semantic version of sour grapes, basically. But of course Luntz doesn’t really explain what he’s trying to say effectively, except for a very vague complaint that Obama equates his grandmother with his pastor. Which was, of course, entirely the point: as Ms. Powers correctly tried to note, Obama was stating that his pastor is imperfect and complex just as his grandmother was, but that he wasn’t about to abandon someone so important in his life just because of some disagreements. (My own great-grandmother, born in Virginia in 1898, once referred to some black children as “pickaninnies.” Should I disown or disavow her?)
This whole thing with Rev. Wright has been a massive attempt to create guilt by association. It is thus disingenuous (at best) to complain when Obama associates his imperfect grandmother with his imperfect pastor.
And by the way, Gary Kamiya has an excellent response to Rev. Wright’s comments in today’s Salon, asserting that “Wright isn’t the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.” With which I entirely agree.
Saying Much, Doing Nothing
Luntz then raises a question that seems to deal with the issue, but doesn’t. It has the effect of making him sound high-minded without his having to actually, you know, be high-minded.
Can we have a discussion in this country about race where we don’t have an approach that tries to level accusations? And can we have a discussion that doesn’t say that whites are racist and African-Americans are not? [Obama neither said nor implied any such thing. Plainly.] Are we going to have this kind of open conversation?
And one other point.... There are issues of economy. Our economy is melting down... and yet, Barack Obama is now responding to his pastor....
You’ve gotta love it. Let’s have an open and frank discussion about race, he seems to say, and then he pivots to the economy. And as to that point, Obama delivered another major address the very next day, on the subject of the Iraq war, then dealt with the economy the day after that. So you can’t say that Obama is getting distracted from other issues, since the very next day he turned to other issues. The thing is--nobody paid any attention to these speeches. Race is a red-meat issue, and that’s all anyone wanted to report on. Obama asked whether we were going to allow ourselves to continue to be distracted, and the media then proceeded to try very hard to distract us.
Then, of course, there was the section of the speech where Obama said that the people trying to distract us, The Privileged Few, include “talkshow hosts and political commentators.” No surprise, Luntz found that personally offensive.
Now, look, let’s talk about class warfare, which is what the Democrats have always tried to do against the Republicans. [Because it’s what the Republicans have been actually doing for lo these many years—the upper class successfully dominating every other class. The Democrats take the trouble to point this out, and get accused of attempting to wage class warfare.] ... This is not about Republicans talking about affirmative action or welfare or Democrats or whatever. This is about a religious figure, a very important person in Senator Obama’s life, who has a point of view that is frightening.
Again: Robertson and Falwell. If you’re going to make the guilt-by-association argument, you have to be open to the possibility that your side is just as tainted, if not more so.
Sean Hannity Ventures an Opinion
Mr. Hannity went on to say:
What if Barack Obama, for the entire year that the MoveOn media out there has ignored any scrutiny of him, and they’ve gone along with the bumper sticker of change and the slogans. What if he really deep down in his heart thinks like Pastor Wright? ... I think that would be dangerous. That would mean we would have—if he agreed with Wright, and I don’t know that he does, but if he did, that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.
Note how artfully that was phrased (Luntz must have helped on this before the show)--while at the same time appearing to be fair by noting that he has no idea whether Obama actually feels that way, Hannity nonetheless found a way to state forcefully and affirmatively, in solid declarative language, “that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.”
Do you feel scared yet? Well why not?! What are you, stupid? A racist and an anti-Semite would be president! You should be terrified of that! Vote Republican!
It went on like that for a while, mixing the “we don’t really know whether he feels that way” language with more fear-mongering, until finally they got weirdly self-congratulatory.
The Grand Finale
Hannity claimed that he was the one who got the Rev. Wright scoop in the first place. Which may be true, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care who scooped whom. But he used this claim to further assert that McCain and Clinton should “stay away from this [issue] and let those of us that have led from the beginning continue to talk about it.”
Yes, it’s true: Sean Hannity, a leading voice for racial dialogue. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?
LUNTZ: And you’ve got the evidence. You’ve got the tape that proves it. Congratulations, Sean.
HANNITY: Thanks. We’ll talk more in the future.
And... commercial break!
I have nothing further to say.
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