HOW THE LIST WORKED

"No one in the Obama administration will respond to me, listen to me, talk to me or read anything that I write to them. I am 'toxic' in terms of the Obama administration"
-Reverend Wright

Not long ago, the leftist discussion group Journolist was shut down due to controversy. Made up of leftist reporters, academics, and activists, the list was a place to discuss topics and shape the news. Over time, bits of the content have been released, and the Daily Caller has a major article up about one such release.

Jonathan Strong has an article at the Caller about how the Journolist handled the scandal around Reverend Wright. Wright, if you remember, was the pastor of Barack Obama's church, the man who preached and taught for over a decade at the black supremacist Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Wright was described by Obama as his "spiritual mentor" (along with radical leftist Catholic Father Pfleger). Obama said about his church "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." The senator then said he turned to Wright for advice and learned much from him, claiming he was a “sounding board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.”

Then, when ABC news and several other organizations revealed some of the horrible, hateful, and distinctly loony statements by Wright in dozens of his sermons which Obama sat through without hearing anything objectionable, a scandal erupted. Journolist was quick to respond, trying to find ways to defuse the scandal and deal with the problem.

It was a puffball question by George Stephanopolous on an ABC News debate that set off the discussion: “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” That's a pretty leading and presumptuous question, assuming the best of Obama and allowing him to distance himself as a contrast. But Journolist was outraged. Strong writes:

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

Their response was predictable: this hurts a Democrat, lets try to stop it and make it go away. However, it is less their hapless attempts at manipulating the news cycle and outrage that concerns me here as why they were upset and what they thought was going on. Because that why reveals a lot about the left and their mindset as opposed to that of the right.

WINNING

Looking over the information at the Caller I see a few themes that leap out. President Obama was associated with a crackpot America hater who blamed the US government for AIDs and drug addictions among blacks, makes repeated racist and hateful comments about whites in particular and groups of whites (Jews, Italians, etc) in specific, and said the US is a terrorist nation that targets blacks. He considered this man his mentor and spiritual leader, attended his church for over a decade and listened to his teaching - yet that was insignificant to the Journolist members.

What did bother them is that this could hurt the chances of a Democrat winning the White House. Chris Hayes at the Nation put it this way:

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”

See, while some of them managed to admit that they were tired of defending the indefensible (one of them mentioned Clinton), the goal was too big to care. Who cares what Obama is like, as long as he's not a Republican? They really believed all the idiotic, childish nonsense that was spewed about President Bush. They believed the stupid crap that was thrown out to see if it stuck, without question. Note Hayes repeating the absurdly discredited Lancet number of Iraqi civilian deaths, for example. And believing that, anyone is better, no matter who, as long as its a Democrat.

PRAGMATISM
The other theme that struck me in this article was the way the left viewed why this was happening. It never occurred to them that people might be outraged by this because it was outrageous. No, it was a vast right wing conspiracy, a media trick.

“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” says Michael Tomasky, writer for the UK Guardian.

Chris Hayes said that the Wright Controversy “...has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some thing — Obama’s substantive agenda — with this crap.”

Their viewpoint was that this was a right wing trick to get power, not a genuine response of outrage and disgust over someone's outrageous and disgusting comments. Wright's statements might have upset these guys, but that wasn't their focus. Their attention was all on pragmatism; that which works vs that which is right or wrong. They were not concerned about whether this was a good idea or not, whether Obama was the right man for the job or whether the nation would benefit. All that mattered was a strategy by which the hated Republicans would lose.

By extension, they presume that the Republicans and the right thought the same way. That anyone would think this was newsworthy and problematic because of Wright's nature and how that reflected on Obama's judgment and character was not even considered. The evil right wing was using this to maintain power, it was a trick, a dirty trick to control the public. Their mindset was perfectly exposed here: ethical pragmatism. Something is good if it accomplishes the intended goal. If you do what you set out to do, everything you did in the process is thereby good. Want some evidence? Read the article: people reject the idea of just picking Republican leaders and calling them racist, not because it would be wrong but because it wouldn't be effective. Right and wrong never come into the discussion at all.

This is the danger of demonizing one's opponent. If you make a big enough monster out of your enemy, then anything becomes acceptable to stop them. Its why action movies make the bad guys so unbelievably, absurdly horrible, because then you shrug at the evils the hero does to stop them. The left worked its self into such an absurd, mindless, lunatic frenzy over President Bush that they didn't care who beat the Republicans, what they did, or how they did it. That's how monsters and tyrants get into power, and it is a cautionary tale for the right. Don't make the Democrats into such a horror that you're willing to abandon every single shred of integrity and honor you have to beat them. Doing right is always better than winning.

SUCCESS
Ultimately it worked. Journolist managed to get the matter just dropped. No one even mentions Wright any more, and they all took Obama's blatant lying reversal at heart. Obama said, after repeatedly calling Wright his spiritual mentor:

"He was never my 'spiritual mentor.' He was — he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you know, the — the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, wasn’t accurate."

They were inaccurate by quoting the exact words you used, Mister President? Yet what he said was good enough for them, he stopped going to the church, and it was dropped. The only people even talking about this man's close relationship with a lunatic racist America hating conspiracy monger black supremacist on sites like this.

The strategy they used to accomplish this was enlightening as well. When the debate happened and Stephanopolous dared to ask an easy answer question of Obama that the Journolist guys feared, they immediately took strong, decisive action: they wrote a sternly-worded letter. That letter was sent out to various news organizations, UN style, and it even became news for a few days. It was News, but Wright was deemed Not News, and he dropped out of the legacy media attention for a while. Then more came out about the reverend's beliefs, and he was back in the news.

The second time Journolist came up with two competing ideas: one was to call Republicans racist until they became the story instead (the same idea used now against the Tea Party, good luck with that), and the second was Chris Hayes' plan:

“I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable.”

Just stop mentioning it. Hayes claims that didn't work, but soon the story just disappeared from the media. All they were waiting on was Barack Obama to make a statement about how he didn't agree with any of that stuff, and he did, claiming he'd never heard anything like that when he attended and that Wright was yet another one of those guys that wasn't the man he knew. And it just went away.

CHANGE
Kevin Drum had a statement I'd like to close on, a final, sad comment on the 2008 election. Unlike Hayes above with his hilarious "substantive agenda" comment about the Obama campaign, Drum knew what was really happening:

“I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

You see, Drum was absolutely right. Obama didn't run on the truth or what he really believed. He ran on doing things differently and changing politics. He ran on Hope that things could be better and the claim that the people, by voting for him, were voting for a Change in how Washington ran.

You'll note Drum doesn't seem to think any of that is true just that it is effective and that any damage to that hurts Obama's chances of fooling people and winning. So they had to stop anything that might interfere with this vapid campaign that was light on specifics, heavy on lying promises, and focused on Obama as savior of America who'd make everything all different. Because they knew if it ended up being about policy and the character of Obama, then the whole thing would fail.

That strategy worked: enough people were fooled to join enough people who'd vote for Josef Megele's bones over a Republican and enough people who voted for the Black guy because he was Black that Barack Obama won.

On the other hand, people absolutely know that the campaign themes of hope and change were utter lies by this point. That all of it was a deliberate system of specific and targeted lies to fool people in order to gain power so he could accomplish a radical leftist agenda. It won't work twice.