Politco Acknowledges That The Left’s Media Criticism Is Right

A piece in Politico raised a lot of interest in the left blogosphere yesterday. In the column, Harris and Vandehei discuss the Obama resurgence as the administration learning to play the media game. As Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent points out, Harris and Vandehei acknowledge that the Left’s media criticism is largely correct. Sergeant discusses this excerpt:

He is doing it by exploiting some of the most long-standing traits among reporters who cover politics and government — their favoritism for politicians perceived as ideologically centrist and willing to profess devotion to Washington’s oft-honored, rarely practiced civic religion of bipartisanship…

The majority of political writers we know might more accurately be accused of centrist bias…Obama is taking advantage of the press’s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy…

Reagan may have shown that deficits don’t matter, as Dick Cheney supposedly said, but the media focus on deficits as the litmus test for all serious politicians goes on. Reporters love hearing Obama talk with a furrowed brow about the grave threat of a $14 trillion pile of debt.

As Greg Sargent points out, the Left has been making this argument for years.

The claims that Washington’s political and media establishment fetishizes bipartisanship regardless of policy details, and that this establishment is all too willing to confer the label of Very Serious Beltway Wise Man on those who profess outsized concern about the deficit, have long been twin pillars of the left’s critique of our political discourse.

Indeed, what Harris and VandeHei are really hinting at here, without quite saying it, is that all the talk about Obama moving to the ideological “center” is a bunch of hogwash. Obama himself told Bill O’Reilly yesterday that he isn’t shifting to the center, and David Axelrod has adamantly denied any “grand positioning,” but too many pundits continue to assert as fact that Obama has moved to the center, without even defining what that means.

We even have a phrase for this – “high Broderism.”. Sometimes I refer to it as bipartisan fetishism. The “centrist” worship usually has nothing to do with actual policy positions – only that Republicans stick their seal of approval on it. That’s why the GOP’s move to the crazy fringe right has been so damaging, the media has moved right along with it. If one side is crazy, perhaps the right answer doesn’t lie in between the crazy and the non-crazy. Now don’t even get me started on budget peacocks…