America's Political/Media Kabuki

Kabuki is defined as a highly stylized form of classical Japanese
dance-drama in which actors often wear elaborate makeup and engage in
precisely dictated movements, a useful metaphor for the current
American political process which can't seem to break out of old
patterns even as the nation hurtles from crisis to crisis.

Although Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of "change" -
and millions of Americans are tired of Washington's destructive habits
- U.S. politicians, the news media and significant parts of the
electorate refuse to transform how they have operated over the past
several decades.

Like a kabuki performance locked in a stale past, the various players
interact in predictable ways, moving about each other with elaborate
yet tiresome maneuvers: the Republicans and the right-wing media
posturing as bullies, the Democrats cowering in fear, the mainstream
press obsessed with the superficial, and many on the Left carping from
the fringes.

A good example
of how this kabuki continues to play out was in the criticism of
President Obama's plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

His judgment - though shared by former President George W. Bush and key
members of that administration - was viewed by Republicans and
right-wing talk radio as an inviting new "wedge" issue. They sounded
the alarm about the supposed danger of transferring detainees to U.S.
super-max prisons or resettling some, like the Chinese Uighurs, who
have been judged no threat to the United States.

As the "not in my backyard" furor built - and some Americans panicked
over scary fantasies about Islamic terrorists breaking out of super-max
prisons and roaming the countryside - congressional Democrats retreated
rather than stand their ground. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
joined a 90-6 vote in deleting $80 million that Obama had requested for
closing down Guantanamo.

The
U.S. press corps also bought into the Republican exaggerations of
dangers - much as occurred in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The New
York Times again played a key role with a misleading May 21 article
touting a Pentagon report done in the last month of the Bush
administration claiming that one in seven of 534 previously released
Guantanamo prisoners had "returned to jihad."

The evidence in the report turned out to be flimsy - with a later
examination by two terrorism experts putting the percentage of former
detainees later connected to violent activities at about one in 25, not
one in seven.

"Bizarrely, the
Defense Department has in the past even lumped into the recidivist
category former prisoners who have done no more than criticize the
United States after their release," analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine
Tiedemann wrote in an op-ed.

Nevertheless, the fear-mongering worked. Former Vice President Dick
Cheney's complaints about Obama putting America at risk were treated
with respect by the U.S. news media despite Cheney's long history of
exaggerating and misrepresenting terror threats. The press billed the
dueling addresses by Obama and Cheney on May 21 as a heavyweight
match-up.

For his part, Obama
appeared defensive, reacting to the harsh attacks from
"no-middle-ground" Cheney and other right-wingers.

"My single most important responsibility as president is to keep the American people safe," Obama said
in his May 21 speech. Using a passage reminiscent of former President
Bush, Obama added: "That is the first thing that I think about when I
wake up in the morning. It is the last thing that I think about when I
go to sleep at night."

Like
many Democrats before him, Obama avoided hard truth-telling: that the
American people must show courage today as their forebears have done so
many times in the past, that the United States must never be a nation
of cowards ready to trade its founding principles of freedom for cheap
-- and likely empty -- promises of greater security. Instead he talked
of a new program for "prolonged detentions" without trials.

Yet, as the Democratic congressional leadership cowered and Obama wavered, the kabuki played out predictably.

As New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, "the deja vu in the news
media was even more chilling. ... Most of the punditocracy scored the
fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men's
ideas. Cheney's pugnacious certitude edged out Obama's law-professor
nuance." [NYT, May 31, 2009]

Despite last year's election results - and despite the news media's
abject failures during the Bush years - the Washington press corps
remains remarkably stagnant. With only a few exceptions, the media is
dominated by the same talking heads on TV, the same high-profile
commentators in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, the
same neocon alarmists and talking-point political strategists.

As with the terror debate, the kabuki also is playing out in Obama's
Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as Republicans and
right-wingers yank some quotes out of context to denounce her as a
"racist," leading Obama and other Democrats to start backtracking and
pleading with the Right to be nice.

The Kabuki's Origin

Essentially, today's Washington kabuki was set in the late 1970s and
early 1980s with the rise of the right-wing media and the political
clout of the Reagan-era Republicans. Those forces went on the offensive
and made it clear that anyone who got in their way would be smeared as
a "blame-America-firster," become a target of 30-second attack ads for
politicians, or face accusations about "liberal bias" for journalists.

As the right-wing media grew and the Republicans became more powerful,
many Democrats and most mainstream journalists learned that to survive
they had to accept their assigned roles. Democrats became practiced at
apologizing, equivocating and seeking accommodation; mainstream
journalists mastered the skill of bending over backwards to appease the
Right.

In that sense, the
early Obama era continues to look a lot like the early Clinton era. In
1992, the voters also reacted to a recession by handing the government
to the Democrats, but Clinton and other Democratic leaders then shunned
any serious investigations of past Republican crimes, saw their
extended hand of bipartisanship swatted away, and soon were cowering
again in the face of GOP belligerence and the right-wing media's
scandal-mongering.

By then,
the mainstream news media knew its role, too. Tired of right-wing
accusations about "liberal bias," the major news outlets, included the
New York Times and the Washington Post, chose to be tougher on a
Democratic administration than they had been on Republicans, especially
during the Reagan era when the national press corps did its best to
look the other way on Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, contra-cocaine
trafficking, etc., etc.

By
contrast, the U.S. news media transformed even minor "scandals" about
Bill Clinton, like his Whitewater real estate investment and some
firings at the White House travel office, into breathless front-page
news.

The American Left also
played its own negative role, albeit a mostly passive one, by avoiding
any significant investment in media infrastructure - opting to
excoriate the "corporate press" - and telling voters that there was
"not a dime's worth of difference" between Al Gore and George W. Bush
when the two faced off in 2000.

After eight disastrous years of President Bush - and another nasty
recession -- American voters again threw the Republicans out of the
White House and elected a strong Democratic majority in Congress.
President Obama also made clear that he intended to be a
transformational leader who would address many of the deep systemic
problems that three decades of Republican dominance had left behind.

But the U.S. political/media system remained remarkably static. With
the exceptions of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and
MSNBC's experimentation with a few liberal hosts during its evening
hours - and some under-funded Web sites and radio outlets - the
American media still functions under the old rules, with an inordinate
amount of time and space given to Republicans despite their weak
minority status.

If anything,
Fox News and right-wing talk radio have escalated their rhetoric; CNN,
the Washington Post and other "centrist" outlets have pandered to
Republican voices; and the premier business network CNBC behaves as if
its treasured "free-market paradigm" had not been shattered by the
ruinous behavior of Wall Street banks and major corporations, like AIG
and GM.

But this
pro-Republican bent of much of the news media had a predictable impact.
Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration shied away from
confrontations, refusing to hold the Bush administration accountable
for its crimes and playing defense, whether in foreign affairs ("weak
on terror") or on economic policy ("socialist!").

The American Left also stayed true to form, still unwilling to engage
seriously in the political/media process. As it did during the
Clinton-Gore years, the Left spends its energies criticizing Democratic
failures (a reprise of the Bush-Gore "not a dime's worth of difference"
chant) rather than investing in and building media and other
institutions that might help change the dynamic.

So, more than four months into the Obama era - with the United States
staggering through a major economic crisis and with global challenges
mounting - the political/media kabuki continues.

The same ornately costumed characters - snarling Republicans, angry
right-wingers, cringing Democrats, careerist media personalities and an
ineffectual Left - maneuver around each other in a stylistically
choreographed dance of national failure.