Did you know that one-third of children in Ohio are enrolled in
Medicaid? Neither did I, until last week when I picked up a copy of
the Bucyrus (Ohio) Telegraph-Forum and read down
to the seventh paragraph of a story headlined, “Study
says more children have health insurance.”
The positive spin in the headline was undercut by the
statistical facts of the story: “The increase in children on
insurance comes as median incomes across the state were relatively
flat, and the percentage of families in poverty — especially
those with children — rose slightly.” An increase in poverty,
in other words, actually reduced the number of uninsured
children by qualifying them for coverage under a government program
for the poor. Such was the substance of the explanation by Angela
Krile, spokeswoman for the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association,
who said: “Really, this just shows the importance of Medicaid in
our state for children.”
Americans have become accustomed to this sort of “good news” in
the Obama era, and there was more of it in that small-town Ohio
paper. “Unemployment
remains the same,” declared the headline across the top of the
front page. The story explained that, although the official
unemployment rate in Crawford County, Ohio (population 43,389)
declined from 9 percent in July to 8 percent in August, it wasn’t
because more people were working. “Since the number of employed
stayed the same, 200 people went off of unemployment because their
time limit is up and they have not found work yet,” Dave
Williamson, director of the Crawford County Economic Development
Partnership, told the Bucyrus paper. “We have no more people
working than we did last month.”
Extrapolate such statistical hocus-pocus at the local level
across the entire state of Ohio, or nationwide, and you understand
how some people might be deceived into believing that the Obama
administration has actually produced an economic recovery. Yet it
doesn’t take much effort to discover how grim the situation really
is. Right there on the same front page of the same newspaper was
another headline that made this unfortunately clear. “Local
children are going hungry,” was the headline on the story about
a local charitable effort to help feed the shockingly large number
of poor children in Bucyrus. A spokeswoman for the project said
“more than 70 percent of our students require assistance with food
by receiving free or reduced lunches.” That percentage has risen in
recent years, and this evidence of increasing poverty in a small
Ohio town (Bucyrus has a population of 12,253) may come as a shock
to anyone who has bought into the Obama administration’s claims
that the president’s policies have meaningfully improved the
economy in Ohio or anywhere else.
Convincing voters that President Obama’s economic policies have
been an abject failure — and that another four years would
only make this failure worse — is the primary task Mitt
Romney must accomplish in tonight’s debate. Conservatives who have
opposed the Obama agenda all along are understandably exasperated
by recent polls indicating that most Americans either think the
economy is improving or else don’t blame the president for the
continuing malaise. How could it be, for example, that Obama has
led the 14 most recent polls included in the
Real Clear Politics average? How could a
Roanoke College poll show Obama ahead 47-39 — eight
points! — in Virginia? How could a
Columbus Dispatch poll show Obama leading
51-42 — nine points! — in Ohio?
Skeptics who detect evidence of bias in these polls have been
denounced by Jonathan Chait as “poll denialists,” one of those
accusations, like “homophobia,” by which those who disagree with
liberals are casually diagnosed as mentally ill. If the polls are
not biased, however, conservatives must confront the question:
Who’s really crazy here? Us, or the surprisingly large percentage
of people who think it’s a good idea to re-elect this miserable
failure of a president?
One alternative to what might be called the Mass Insanity Theory
of Obama’s mysterious poll advantage is to fault Romney himself for
having failed to attack the incumbent with sufficient stridency.
The “Blame Mitt” school of thought is fairly sizeable among
conservatives with less-than-fond memories of 2008 Republican
nominee John McCain’s kid-gloves approach to his Democratic
opponent. However, having attended several rallies at which both
Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan slammed the president pretty
hard in their speeches, I am reluctant to believe that the GOP
candidates are guilty of being too nice to Obama. As much
as some of our friends may wish to hear the president excoriated as
a lying Marxist who is deliberately trying to destroy the American
constitutional republic, it’s unrealistic to expect that kind of
accusation to be made directly by his Republican challenger.
If these theories — biased polls, mass insanity, or a “too
nice” GOP candidate — are all inadequate to explain why Obama
appears to be taking a substantial lead into tonight’s debate,
what’s left? Ah, yes: The damned liberal media!
This was the topic of a remarkable
open letter last week from the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell
III and other conservatives who charged that the media “are
rigging this election and taking sides in order to pre-determine
the outcome,” and that, in doing so, biased journalists “have
breached the public trust by willfully turning a blind eye to the
government’s public policy failures, both domestic and
foreign.”
What could explain such a dereliction of professional duty
except partisan loyalty?
A number of studies have shown that Democrats in the press
corps outnumber Republicans by margins of at least 4-to-1 and
perhaps as much as 12-to-1. One of the best-known of these studies,
based on a
survey of Washington-based reporters after the 1992 election,
found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton, more than twice the
43 percent vote Clinton got from the electorate at large. Citing
particular proofs of this bias (we all have our favorite examples,
including Nina
Burleigh’s infamously lascivious praise of Clinton) seems at
this point redundant, and efforts to counteract this bias by
exposing it seem futile. The reporters and editors whom former CBS
newsman Bernard Goldberg accused of a “slobbering
love affair” with Obama four years ago have no sense of shame
about serving as stenographers for the Democrat’s re-election
campaign, and liberal journalists tend to reject all conservative
criticism as “whining” from disgruntled wingnuts.
Thus, tonight’s debate offers Romney a rare chance to make his
case to a national audience directly, absent the distorting filter
of a hostile media. Yet even then, as George Washington University
political science professor
John Sides points out, research shows that voters may be
influenced less by the debates themselves than by how the debates
are covered by the media. So it may be that nothing Romney or
anyone else says can overcome the partisan prejudices of those
pro-Obama journalists whom Rush Limbaugh has compared to a
Praetorian guard protecting their imperial president.
Is there yet any room for hope, or are we utterly doomed? Well,
there are still honest reporters in America, or else I never would
have been able to find those disturbing facts on the front page of
the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum. And if this election were
only about the fates of a couple of politicians, the disgrace of
the national press — their refusal to hold Obama responsible
for the self-evident failures of his policies — might not
trouble me as much as it does. However, there are others whose
futures are at stake, others who have been cruelly betrayed by the
president’s glib promises of Hope and Change. But I don’t expect
any network anchors will lose much sleep tonight over those poor
children in Ohio.
