After the 2004 election, conservatives loved blogs. “As CBS News
can tell you, the rise of the Internet… is the latest and perhaps
most explosive change that is shrinking liberal media dominance,”
wrote Brian Anderson in his 2005 book, South Park
Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.
It was a blogger, Charles Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs.com,
who proved that the “memos” that were the basis of CBS’s hit piece
on President Bush’s National Guard service were produced on
Microsoft Word, not a 1970s typewriter. Conservative bloggers also
gave respectful attention to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who
challenged John Kerry’s campaign narrative portraying him as a war
hero. The mainstream media had, for the most part, uncritically
repeated that narrative and almost unanimously dismissed the Swift
Boat Veterans as liars.
It would overstate the case to say that bloggers cost John Kerry
the election, but it is surely accurate to say that he lost despite
having the support of the mainstream media, and that the efforts of
bloggers contributed to that outcome.
In 2008, by contrast, the liberal media’s candidate won big.
Journalists rooted hard for Barack Obama, as some of them
acknowledged after the election. “It’s the most disgusting failure
of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Time’s Mark
Halperin said at a November 21 panel. “It was extreme bias, extreme
pro-Obama coverage.” The same week, in a column titled “A Giddy
Sense of Boosterism,” Washington Post media reporter
Howard Kurtz opined that in reporting on the president-elect, “we
seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking.”
To be sure, Obama’s victory was the product of many factors
apart from media coverage. Voters had soured on Republican
leadership, as they showed in the 2006 midterm elections. Obama ran
a brilliant campaign, most impressive for dispatching the Clinton
machine in the primaries. He had the good sense to refuse taxpayer
financing in the general election, giving him a huge financial
edge. John McCain was unpopular among his own party’s conservative
base, and while Sarah Palin largely overcame this disadvantage, her
poor performance in early interviews made non-conservative voters
uneasy.
Still, it shouldn’t have been this easy for the Democrats. The
conservative blogosphere was supposed to have kept the MSM honest,
challenging its partiality toward liberal candidates. “Debunking
humbug—especially liberal humbug—is one of the web’s most
powerful political effects,” Anderson wrote in 2005. That had
certainly been true in 2004. What went wrong in 2008?
One difference between the two elections was that, to anyone
familiar with Kerry’s long history in public life, his campaign
narrative was an obvious fraud. A man who made a name for himself
three decades earlier as an anti war extremist, slandering fellow
veterans as war criminals, could not plausibly put himself forward
as a “war hero.”
By comparison, Obama’s novelty worked in his favor. Until his
impressive keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National
Convention, hardly anyone outside Chicago had even heard of him.
This gave him—and sympathetic reporters, if you’ll pardon the
redundancy—a more or less free hand in telling his story. Thus
Obama was able to present himself successfully as an idealistic,
intelligent, cool-headed man capable of governing competently and
helping America transcend racial and ideological divides.
There were facts about Obama that contradicted, or at least
raised questions about, this narrative. Foremost among these were
Obama’s connections with dubious Chicago figures: real estate
developer turned felon Tony Rezko, terrorist turned education
scholar Bill Ayers, and anti-American crackpot preacher Jeremiah
Wright. The mainstream media doubtless would have pursued these
connections relentlessly had Obama been a conservative Republican.
(In fairness, the Wright matter did receive a thorough airing
during the primary season, though this meant that it could be
dismissed as “old news” by the fall.)
Conservative websites did raise these and other questions. But
so many of them engaged in irresponsible rumor-mongering and
conspiracy-theorizing that it called into question the entire
enterprise. In October, for instance, as the McCain campaign was
trying to make an issue of Obama’s friendship with Ayers, American
Thinker.com published an article by one Jack Cashill speculating
that Ayers might have ghostwritten Obama’s acclaimed biography,
Dreams from My Father:
For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of
Dreams as “Obama.” Without question, he contributed much
of the book’s raw material, especially the long-winded accounting
of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass
muster. The book’s fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social
analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days,
a much tighter book.
Fugitive Days was Ayers’s widely panned 2001 memoir.
Other bloggers claimed Obama was a secret Muslim. They spun
elaborate theories about young Barack’s school days in Indonesia,
his stepfather’s native land, where he lived with his mother for a
few years beginning in the late 1960s.
THEN THERE WAS THE citizenship canard. Obama was born in Hawaii
just under two years after statehood, so he fulfills the
constitutional requirement that a president be a natural-born
citizen. (Ironically, McCain, born in the Panama Canal Zone while
his father was stationed there in the Navy, is natural-born only by
virtue of a statute extending the definition to include his
circumstances.)
Detractors claimed that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was
phony and that he was actually born in Kenya. Some anti-Obama
bloggers pinned their hopes on a lawsuit filed by Philip Berg, a
Pennsylvania lawyer who had earlier brought legal actions alleging
that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were to blame for the
9/11 attacks. A federal district court summarily dismissed Berg
v. Obama for lack of standing.
On the Friday after Election Day, blogress Joan Swirsky
excitedly claimed that the Supreme Court was about to act:
Justice David Souter’s Clerk informed Philip J. Berg…that his
petition for an injunction to stay the November 4th election was
denied, but the Clerk also required the defendants to respond to
the Writ of Certiorari (which requires the concurrence of four
Justices) by December 1. At that time, Mr. Obama must present to
the Court an authentic birth certificate, after which Mr. Berg will
respond.
If Obama fails to do that, it is sure to inspire the skepticism
of the Justices, who are unaccustomed to being
defied.
This was almost entirely humbug. It was true—and wholly
unsurprising—that Souter had denied Berg’s request to postpone the
election. It was also true that December 1 was the deadline for
responses to Berg’s petition for certiorari (i.e., his request for
the high court to hear an appeal). But Obama was not required to
respond, and he did not. The dismissal of Berg’s case was based on
well-settled law, so there was no reason to expect the high court
to agree to review it. Even if it had, the only question before the
justices would have been whether the dismissal was in error. Under
no circumstances would the Supreme Court have demanded evidence of
fact, such as an “authentic” birth certificate.
Bob Bartley, the legendary editor of the Wall Street
Journal, observed late in his life that the trouble with the
web is its lack of editors. This shortcoming was glaringly on
display during last year’s election. It is the reason the
conservative blogosphere in 2008 turned out to be not all it was
cracked up to be in 2004.
