I bought a two-year subscription to Rolling Stone last
year from some kid who knocked on my door and promised that buying
the magazine would help keep him off drugs and off the streets.
It…might have happened.
Typically I skip over the political content and get right down
to the psychoanalysis of the latest Eminem track and the write-ups
of one hit wonders who are very rich today, and who will be very
poor tomorrow. When the June 10 issue landed in my mailbox,
however, the political dessert on display was just too delicious to
resist.
The Ted Offensive, the dreamy piece of, um, journalism
in question, comes with the action-movie tagline, “In 2002, George
W. Bush stabbed Ted Kennedy in the back. Two years later, Teddy’s
in John’s corner and they’re aiming for the White House.” The
inference is that Kennedy is a one-time Bush supporter who has
suddenly changed his mind.
The rest of the article is a piece of work. The famed drunkard,
author Will Dana writes, “has aged into a grand old man, all wavy
white hair and heavy jowls.” Like Santa Claus. But Kennedy’s
heroism is more than skin deep.
From the Massachusetts Senator’s red-faced — sorry, rosy
cheeked — rants against any proposal to the right of something
Ralph Nader might offer up, you may not have realized that he
“routinely” reaches right “across the partisan divide.” This
included reaching out to President Bush in January 2001 to make the
No Child Left Behind bill a reality.
His own benevolence should be no surprise, Kennedy says. After
all, he worked closely with Presidents Reagan and Bush I. “You
could believe what they said,” he explains. Not so with this Bush,
who has ruined everything. He’s packed the courts with “right-wing
ideologues,” polarized Congress, and committed the “greatest
foreign disaster and blunder in the history of this nation” in
Iraq. (The whole history of this nation? What about World War I?
What about Vietnam? Oh, wait, that was Kennedy’s
brother.)
Also, most painfully for Kennedy, Bush did not “fully fund” No
Child Left Behind.
TO BACK THIS UP VISUALLY, Rolling Stone has a picture of
Bush with his hands on Kennedy’s shoulders, both smiling. I’m not
sure which political party this is supposed to embarrass more.
“Kennedy and Bush in better times,” the caption reads. A wronged
man, Kennedy is now “sounding off like a fiery backbencher,” Dana
explains. His attacks on the president contain “an edge of personal
betrayal.”
In fact, Dana gives Kennedy a Louisville Slugger and then softly
lobs question after question over the plate. There are no
substantive queries about the situation in Iraq, about why John
Kerry would be better than Bush on that issue, or even why he would
be better on any policy issues, like, oh, Social Security.
“Bush has recently opened up on Kerry with an unprecedented
negative attack,” Dana says, setting up a question. Apparently
several long months of Democratic candidates lambasting and
personally mocking Bush doesn’t quite make it all the way to
“negative.”
Kennedy, it turns out, agrees. Asked about what kind of campaign
Bush will run, bipartisan Ted says the president will take the low
road and attempt to “destroy Senator Kerry” rather than campaign on
his own merits. In fact, “This is the first president in my time,
and my understanding of history, who runs away from his record.”
Which is the part where someone behind the scenes should have held
up a cue card for Dana reading: “But isn’t Kerry running away from
his liberal voting record?”
Dana refuses to challenge Kennedy, and often decides to do the
Massachusetts senator one better. To wit: “The key issue, it seems,
comes back to the president’s credibility.” More Dana: “Of course,
there is Bush’s record of appointing arch-conservative judges to
the federal bench.” And again, on Iraq: “Are you surprised that
they were able to pull it off, that they were able to get Congress
and the American people to go along with it?”
I wonder if even Kennedy was surprised at the coddling he got
from the magazine that once employed P.J. O’Rourke and a few decent
journalists.
IT ISN’T THE FAWNING coverage of the Dean Martin of Liberalism
that’s alarming. I’d understand a rickety, over the hill, faux
hipster magazine celebrating the tenets of liberalism and embracing
Kennedy as its standard bearer. But this distortion, this fallacy,
of Kennedy as a middle-of-the-road dealmaker is, well,
troubling.
As Eric Pfeiffer writes in the latest issue of
Doublethink, no one expects Rolling Stone to warm
up to Bush or other conservatives. But, in a magazine that clearly
hopes to be taken seriously, there should be some semblance of
fairness. “If not for its Republican subscribers or out of respect
for the intelligence of other readers,” Pfeiffer writes, “than
simply for the sake of having better writing to publish,
Rolling Stone should exit the screaming section of the far
left bleachers…”
Nor is the magazine unique in trying to fob off intractable
liberalism as moderate temporizing. On the campaign trail in New
Hampshire, I met teenagers and aging hippies who derided Joe
Lieberman as a “religious fundamentalist” and, worse, a
“Republican.” Foaming-at-the-mouth “moderates” routinely denounce
that right-wing ideologue George W. Bush, who, incidentally, signed
onto the farm bill, steel tariffs, the Medicare bill, and No Child
Left Behind.
“We are paralyzed here in the Senate,” Kennedy laments. In this
partisan paralysis, nothing is getting done. No meaningful
legislation is being advanced. Congress might as well pack it up
and go home early. We’ve arrived at a new era of gridlock and
right-wing creep.
Oh, if only it were true!
