Entries in MassPoliticsProfs by Jerold Duquette
My daughter’s English class read Jonathan Swift’s satirical classic “A Modest Proposal” and were assigned the task of writing their own satirical proposal for a curing serious social malady. I thought the assignment timely, but a bit tricky. The line between serious and satire in our national political conversation is definitely not as clear as it used to be. The line between comedy and the race for the GOP 2016 presidential nomination appears to have been completely erased.
The Stakes of the 2016 presidential election are very high for Democratic constituencies because retention of the White House could well be the only thing preventing Republicans from repealing the 20th Century. This is one of my primary takeaways from a vigorous and thoughtful ongoing debate among academics and data journalists about the precarious position of the Democratic Party nationally going into the 2016 elections.
Realistic analyses of the 2016 election continue to be largely ignored by most of the national news media talkers and writers. On air segments or columns/blog posts acknowledging realistic analyses of the ongoing presidential primary races in both parties are lightly sprinkled in with the “infotainment” that pays the bills. As long as the imperatives of the media marketplace are given greater weight than the duty to inform and educate the public, national media outlets will continue to distort political reality in order to produce enough marketable content to satisfy their 24/7/365 political programing needs. Sadly, the unchecked role of big money in our politics combined with the increasing ratings value of big celebrity in media coverage of our politics promise to make this media-generated gap between political reality and political reality TV even greater.
Last week Brendan Nyhan argued that Democrats shouldn’t expect the chaos in the Republican House of Representatives to hurt the Republicans in the 2016 elections. He is on very solid ground in terms of next year’s congressional elections. Congressmen simply are not punished at the ballot box for Congressional dysfunction and, as Thomas Edsall recently explained well, several national trends bode well for GOP efforts to protect their Congressional majority next year. However, I don’t think Nyhan's analysis is as persuasive in terms of the GOP’s presidential aspirations in 2016.
Last week I wrote about how Father Quigley, a priest at UMass, had taught me about Catholic compassion and the possibility that Pope Francis’ demonstration of Catholic compassion would present an opportunity for liberals to broaden their appeal to Catholic voters. This week we learned that the Pope met with Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, which has been taken by many as evidence that my political hypothesis was naïve at best. While I admit that upon hearing the news of this meeting I was genuinely disappointed, I quickly realized it was far from a “disaster” and that holding the Pope to conventional public relations standards is absurd. By visiting with Kim Davis Francis was indeed obeying Father Quigley’s moral directive.
Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post made the following comment on Facebook about Trump’s non-correction of a New Hampshire supporter’s assertion that the President is Muslim: “Does this hurt Trump? Help him? I have totally lost the ability to know at this point.”
Anyone who watched last night’s GOP debate thinking that Donald Trump was a commanding alpha male came away disabused of that notion. He’s a VERY thin-skinned narcissist who can’t take a joke and last night’s extended format helped show the severe limitations of his shtick. Trump’s act is made for commercial TV, but CNN went PBS on his ass. Allowing the debate to continue for three hours left “The Donald” about two hours short on glib one-liners.