Kucinich; The Rodney Dangerfield of the Dems
In the October 6 Nation, near the end of an article about Howard Dean, Matt Taibbi starts discussing the "horse-racing" aspect of the coverage of a presidential election and in just a few short paragraphs gives a vibrant example of the worst of political coverage. It also reveals a lot about the true biases of the media. Discussing with his colleagues covering the Dean campaign the value of this kind of coverage, talking about who could win, who has the momentum, who is garnering the crowds, who has the buzz, he states that no fewer than four replied that unless they focused on electability "'someone like Kucinich' might get the nomination." Clearly they think, and we are to think, that this would be a bad thing. It's never explained why, though, this would be so bad.
Don't think that this kind of attitude by the press, by the people writing the stories about a Presidential race and by the people who assign those people doesn't go a long way toward deciding who gets to be President. We only have to go back four years to see this effect; to see that because many in the press covering the Presidential election, many of our so called elite, slanted their coverage in such a way that the obvious lies of George Bush as he explained the effects of his proposed programs were overlooked and actual true things that came out of the mouth of Gore were characterized as lies, that the press decided, for reasons completely unrelated to the actual positions of the candidates, what we would know about them. (Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Gore or Bush. For reasons I may discuss at another time, I voted for Nader.) Now in the Democratic primary campaign we see the press covering just four or five candidates as if they have a viable chance of winning, as if they are newsworthy, while giving at best token mention of the rest. And for some reason, Kucinich always seems to come out on the shortest end of this stick. In a recent two page Newsweek story about the Dem candidates, all the remaining candidates but one were mentioned. That one was Kucinich. It seems that it can't be an accident.
One of the reasons I suspect that candidates like Kucinich get overlooked is because his proposals are different than those of the other candidates. To cover him properly would mean that the press would have to study and, perhaps more ominously for them, understand his positions and how they are different from the others. This is way too much like work. So much easier to analyze polls or interview people in the street. To talk about electability.
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