The media always has an established theme — a narrative — into
which the coverage of political stories is shoehorned. Sometimes
that results in important stories being ignored because they just
don’t fit. That’s okay with the media bosses this year because
they’re not in the news business. They’re in the business of
helping Obama get re-elected.
The narrative is important because it shapes the flow of
information voters get and thus defines the political debate. If
the narrative controls what the voters hear, read, and see — and
it usually does — then the voters are thinking and deciding on the
basis of the information to which they’re exposed. Were it not for
conservative talk radio and publications such as the
Spectator, the media would be pretty much in total control
of that information flow leading up to the election.
Before the Iowa caucuses, the media narrative of the
Republican primaries was pretty much a personality contest about
who was more electable, who was more conservative — or, as the
media phrase it, more radical — and who was going to score in
Iowa’s beauty contest in which social issues usually play a
disproportionate role.
Mitt Romney’s campaign had launched a barrage of negative
ads against Gingrich and when Gingrich finished fourth, it was
clear that the former speaker needed to do something to change the
narrative. It was the right moment for him to do it, and he could
have with — for example — a speech critical of the media I
suggested on this page some weeks ago.
But Gingrich’s ego was injured. The fact that Romney’s
negative ads worked really got under his skin. On the morning of
caucus day, Gingrich called Romney a liar on a talk radio show, and
in the thirteen days since the Republican primary campaign has
followed a script that could have been written by David Axelrod. It
has formed a media narrative around the top two candidates that is
so damaging that both of them need to do everything in their power
— which may not be enough — to change it.
For two weeks, Gingrich and Rick Perry have stuck to the
theme that Romney, as a venture capitalist in the Bain Capital firm
in the 1990s, destroyed jobs and hurt people in ways that the two
intimate (but don’t say directly) were unethical, unfair, and
possibly illegal. The two — directly and through an independent
“SuperPAC” supporting Gingrich —- have carpet-bombed Romney for
his role in Bain, but making themselves collateral
damage.
Perry, whose campaign has already failed, lashed out at
Romney for “vulture capitalism.” That undefined term implies
financial corruption and worse. Gingrich has ranted against
Romney’s form of capitalism in terms (such as accusing Romney of
“looting” companies) previously unheard among conservatives. It’s
the language of the Occupy Wall Street riffraff. Many conservatives
have called on both to cool down, but neither has.
Now we have a 30-minute hit video titled “King of Bain” supposedly
documenting Romney’s actions at Bain Capital published by “Winning
Our Future,” a Gingrich-supporting “SuperPAC.”
“King of Bain” is comprehensively vile. I watched it. You
should too. It looks and sounds like an MSNBC feature story replete
with every lefty cliché and “Occupy Wall Street” theme there is.
And it’s so full of falsehoods that the Washington Post’s
“Fact Checker” column
awarded it four “Pinocchios.”
Winning Our Future hasn’t corrected or withdrawn the video
in light of the publicized problems. Instead, WOF managing director
Greg Phillips issued a smarmy “open
letter” to Romney on January 13 offering to revise the video if
Romney answers — to Phillips — five questions he poses in the
letter and threatening to keep pushing the unchanged video if he
doesn’t.
Gingrich has called on WOF to fix the errors in the video
or take it off the air. But after Phillips’s letter to Romney,
that’s not enough. Gingrich should have condemned the video and
issue a statement that any independent groups supporting him must
not engage in smearing his opponents. On Meet the Press
yesterday,
Gingrich unconscionably defended the WOF open letter to Romney. The
video is now Newt’s version of the Ron Paul newsletters.
In the Democrat-media culture, Republicans are always the
heartless big business-Wall Street-rich man’s party. Now we have
two supposedly conservative Republicans attacking Romney starting
from that point and taking a quantum jump into terms used only by
the most radical lefties.
Gingrich and Perry have created a media narrative that
says Romney and Bain were vulture capitalists and corporate
looters. If you buy that and watch “King of Bain” you might confuse
Romney’s old company with something run by Bane, the super-villain
in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight
Rises. From the movie trailer we know
that Catwoman will meow lines taken from the Occupy Wall Street
crowd. I can hardly wait to see how the Dems will combine “King of
Bain” with the movie (“Bane Capital”?) this fall.
The context in which the Gingrich-Perry narrative has to
be judged is the underlying Obama campaign narrative from which the
media will never vary. It is class warfare, pure and simple. Obama
has identified himself — and his administration — with the Occupy
Wall Street groups. They exist only to attack capitalism. Romney’s
Bain Capital is the perfect symbol of it for them to attack because
it benefits Obama to do so and is bespoke tailored to Obama’s class
warfare politics.
It’s too late to change the narrative before the South
Carolina primary this Saturday. The damage has been done. The media
will ensure that it is repeated many times because it will damage
whoever is the Republican nominee, Romney or Gingrich.
Nevertheless, both Gingrich and Romney have a duty to try to move
the narrative away from Bain Capital. But to what?
Both Romney and Gingrich have ideas to help our economy.
Obama has just told Congress he wants to use the last $1 trillion
in borrowing authority given him in the August debt ceiling deal.
Our debt now exceeds the annual value of our entire economy, and
nothing is being done to get us out of the no-growth “jobless
recovery” we’re still suffering through.
House and Senate Republicans are in desperate need of
presidential-level leadership. That’s hard to do before we have a
Republican president, but not impossible. The Dems hold the Senate,
but Republicans hold the House and can, if they want to, actually
pass bills quickly despite the Dems’ objections.
Gingrich and Romney should each take their two or three
top economic ideas to Speaker Boehner, Republican Conference
Chairman Tom Price, and Republican Steering Committee Chairman Jim
Jordan. Ask them to put the ideas in legislation and bring them up
for a vote.
At that point, the debate can be shifted to opposing Obama
and seeing who — between Romney and Gingrich — can best help lead
Congress to actually accomplish something.
The Republican Party is in desperate need of a national
leader. Neither Romney nor Gingrich can achieve that stature unless
they can demonstrate — beyond the primaries — the leadership
talent that person must have. How else are you going to do it,
gents?
