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chris matthews
Did Chris Matthews Reveal That Democratic Establishment's Real Fear Is a Bernie Win?
Notice that the central worry from many in the corporate media is not that Sanders will lose to Trump, but that he will win.
Mar 02, 2020
Mainstream news outlets keep pounding home the same message--that the "Democratic establishment" or "Democratic moderates" are worried sick that Bernie Sanders can't beat Trump. They worry about a Trump landslide, and a "down-ballot disaster" in Congressional races.
Democratic insiders, we're told, fear a re-run of 1972--when progressive antiwar candidate George McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to Richard Nixon. Given our divided electoral map, with nearly 40 states safely blue or red, such a scenario in 2020 is thoroughly absurd.
That didn't stop now-ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews--who abruptly resigned Monday night after having had an on-air, Sanders-induced crack-up in recent weeks--from offering this prophecyin mid-February: "I was there in 1972 at the Democratic convention when the people on the left were dancing in glee. . . And they went on to lose 49 states in their glee. So that could happen again. So clearly. That's what I see. It could happen again."
Let's put aside that mad prediction. Or Matthews' paranoid Cold War comment linking Sanders somehow to public executions in New York's Central Park. Or his comparison of Sanders' triumph in Nevada to the finality of the Nazi conquest of France.
And let's recognize that even a crazed TV character--like the fictional Howard Beale in the "Network"--is capable of blurting out an important truth once in a while. On the eve of the Nevada caucus, Matthews let the cat out of the bag about the true fears of many in the Democratic establishment:
I'm wondering whether the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President. Maybe that's too exciting a question to raise--they don't like Trump at all. Do they want Bernie Sanders to take over the Democratic Party in perpetuity? If he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party. Maybe they'd rather wait four years and put in a Democrat that they like.
Notice that the worry here is not that Sanders will lose, but that he will win. And proceed to transform the Democratic Party. And presumably the country.
Matthews was not expressing fear of 1972. It was more like fear of 1932. That's when Franklin Roosevelt (a Sanders hero) triumphed and--propelled by labor and socialist movements--transformed society with a New Deal benefiting working people.
The corporate media's "Bernie can't win" drumbeat should arouse skepticism among news consumers. First, because political outcomes are difficult to predict--especially after an unstable reality-TV star and a young African American (middle name "Hussein") won the White House. Second, because few have been more wrong for so long in their predictions than mainstream media pundits and their pals in the Democratic establishment.
"In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore, was sure to win. He didn't. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn't."
In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore, was sure to win. He didn't. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn't.
As a newspaper of the corporate Democratic establishment (and endorser of Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries), the New York Times has long repeated the "Bernie can't win" mantra. So I give the Timescredit for publishing an important opposing view last week in a guest column by analyst Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color: "Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here's the Math."
Phillips cites head-to-head polling that shows Sanders beating Trump nationally and "outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania."
Phillips says the changing electorate (even from 2016 to 2020) and the particular way that Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada augur well for Sanders as the candidate who best matches up against Trump:
In all three early states, he received twice as much support from voters under 30 than his closest competitor. In Nevada, he received about 70 percent of the vote in the most heavily Latino precincts. . . This will be the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up fully one-third of all eligible voters. The share of eligible voters from Generation Z (18-23-year-olds) will be more than twice as large in 2020 as it was in 2016.
More than other contenders, Sanders has shown he can inspire the two fastest-growing, anti-Trump sectors of the electorate--youth voters and Latinos. Writes Phillips: "In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in 2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million young people have since turned 18." He notes that "160,000 Latinos have turned 18" in Arizona, a state Trump won by only 91,000 votes.
I coproduced a documentary in which we interviewed working-class whites in the Rust Belt of Ohio,longtime Democrats who'd voted for Obama, voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and then jumped to Trump (often out of anger over NAFTA). These are the so-called "Obama-Trump voters"--and no Democratic nominee is likely to win more of them back than Sanders.
The progressive senator is also "most likely to reclaim those Democratic voters who defected to the Green Party"--the "Obama-Stein voters." As Phillips points out: "The increase in votes for Jill Stein from 2012 to 2016 was greater than Mr. Trump's margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin."
As the South Carolina primary showed, one crucial voting bloc that Sanders has so far had trouble inspiring is older African Americans--although he beat Biden among blacks under 30, according to an NBC News exit poll.
If mainstream media spent less time on horse-race analysis and dubious predictions, and more time accurately presenting the candidates' records, perhaps almost every voter of every color would know that Sanders was a brave civil rights activist at the University of Chicago--a student leader in the then-renowned Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), who "sat-in" and was arrested protesting discrimination against African Americans.
The pictures of young Bernie in action are dramatic and important to see.
At least as important as seeing Trump swing a golf club--or watching the latest anti-Sanders smear from TV pundits carrying onthe Chris Matthews tradition.
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Media Fails to Challenge Lies
Dec 31, 2010
MSNBC's Chris Matthews had a good laugh during a recent segment about the five biggest political lies of 2010. PolitiFact gave the top prize to Republicans and pundits who repeatedly lied--and got away with it--by calling the healthcare bill a "government takeover."
After showing multiple clips of Republicans repeating the same lie over and over again, Matthews could barely contain his laughter. "Are we watching a Woody Allen movie here?" he asked his guests. "Do they get all their talking points from Frank Luntz? Some guy down on the beach in Santa Monica is knocking out the terminology. The lingo in these people. Don't they know they sound like parrots?"
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown replied by saying that Republicans get away with the lies because they are never challenged during interviews or asked to define the word 'takeover.' Matthews ignored the comment, but did say the healthcare bill is an insurance company takeover. He later wondered if the Heritage Foundation wrote the talking points.
They actually came from Wendell Potter and his health insurance colleagues. Potter is former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, one of the largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States. Potter, who spent 20 years working for CIGNA and Humana, was the main media contact for top-level executives. If a journalist wanted an interview, they had to go through Potter; if he thought the interview would be "friendly," he would approve it. He always sat in on the interview and says journalists rarely challenged executives or asked difficult questions.
In 2008, his conscience got the best of him after visiting the Remote Area Medical's healthcare fair in Wise County, Virginia and saw people standing and sitting in long lines, waiting for free care. "They were treating people in animal stalls and barns. It looked like it might have been a war torn country. I could not believe this was the United States of America."
Shortly after leaving his six-figure job, he decided to expose and speak out against the very practices he once defended.
In his new book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care And Deceiving Americans, he writes, "If you are among those who believe that the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world--despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary-- it's because my fellow spinmeisters and I succeeded brilliantly at what we were paid very well to do with your premium dollars."
"And if you were persuaded that the health care bill President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010 was a 'government takeover of the health care system,' my former colleagues and I earned every penny of our handsome salaries."
The talking points are designed to be simple, catchy, and memorable. Think government takeover of healthcare, death panels, and socialism.
"And you have to say them over and over and over again. And if you hear them often enough, you think it's true," says Potter. "That's why people, even today, think that the legislation created death panels. Obviously it never had anything approaching that kind of provision. People think this legislation is a government takeover of the healthcare system. In reality, it props up our private healthcare system. It guarantees that these private insurance companies are going to be profitable for years and years to come. It will require us to buy their products and it doesn't include a public option, which we needed to have."
Potter says once the talking points are written, they are distributed on Capitol Hill. The process is simple, but it's done discreetly. "You don't hand them to a member of Congress, but you develop very good relationships with staff members. That's key."
He says he also cultivated relationships with television producers and reporters, who, in turn, handed them to pundits and the talking heads on cable shows. As we now know, the lies worked brilliantly.
Potter says he wrote Deadly Spin to show how a huge share of healthcare premiums bankroll relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts focused on protecting profits. The book is as much about public relations and spin as it is about healthcare.
"Without basic knowledge of PR tactics and the ability to distinguish between fact and distortion, Americans--and that includes journalists, both professional and citizen--are at the mercy of spin doctors and the public relations practitioners whose loyalty to their clients outweighs the public's right to the truth," he writes.
One of the many incidents that pushed Potter to speak out happened shortly after the March 5, 2009 White House Health Care Summit at which Karen Ignagni, president of the insurance lobby America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), told President Obmaa he could count on her and the insurance industry. "We want to work with the members of Congress on a bipartisan basis here. You have our commitment. We hear the American people about what's not working. We've taken that seriously," she said. "You have our commitment to play, to contribute, and to help pass health care reform this year."
Potter says it was one of her best performances to date. President Obama responded by saying, "Good. Thank you, Karen. That's good news. That's America's Health Insurance Plans." Potter said the President was played like a "Stradivarius by one of the best lobbyists to ever hit Washington."
According to Potter, Ignagni is one of Washington's most effective communicators and--with a salary and bonuses of $1.94 million in 2008--one of the highest-paid special interest advocates in Washington.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, AHIP, whose members include CIGNA and Humana, gave $86 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose the healthcare bill. "By funneling the money through the Chamber," says the report, "insurers were able to remain at the table negotiating with Democrats while still getting the bill criticized."
On March 9, 2009, MSNBC's Chris Matthews interviewed Mike Tuffin, AHIP's executive vice president of strategic communications. In the introduction, Matthews said, "The same people who helped kill the Clinton's efforts back in the '90s are on the other side now. Times have changed. The worm has turned. The cosmos have shifted. Some of the bad guys are becoming perhaps the good guys."
"There was no doubt about it: Tuffin was on the show as part of AHIP's charm offensive," writes Potter. "And just like Obama, Matthews seemed to be falling for it."
Potter also writes about Health Care America, a "non-partisan, non-profit healthcare" front group formed to discredit Michael Moore and his healthcare documentary Sicko. A quick search would show that there was nothing non-partisan about Health Care America. It was set up by APCO Worldwide, one of the country's largest and most powerful public relations firms.
Not only did APCO succeed in getting their talking points into most of the stories that appeared about the film, writes Potter, but "not a single reporter had done enough investigative work to find out that insurers had provided the lion's share of funding to set up Health Care America."
Potter says even though the health insurance bill has passed, the spin continues. The health insurance industry, banks, weapons manufacturers, and oil companies won't lose their power until their lies are challenged and the public understands how spin and manipulation works. "We will never be free of spin, but we can be wise to it, and we can push back against it. There is too much at stake not to try."
Listen to Your Call's interview with Wendell Potter.
Video interview with Wendell Potter, Part I
Video interview with Wendell Potter, Part II
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