The Old Gray Lady And The Tuesday "Stupids"

Yes, it’s Tuesday, and David Brooks appears once more. However, I didn’t get to him yet (though I may later).

No, the subject of this post is Times columnist Bob Herbert, a man of great talent and insight who absolutely should know better than to concoct the dreck that was published today under his name.

Herbert’s column has to do with the upcoming PA Democratic primary, and he speaks with voters in Tremont, Scranton, and some other PA towns and cities who communicated their opinions about all three of the candidates currently running for president (as well as a certain occupant of An Oval Office who is universally despised)…

The issue of race seemed always in the air. But competing with race as an issue, and perhaps trumping it, was economics. This is an area that’s hurting. Tony Walck, the mayor of the village of Nesquehoning and a big Clinton supporter, talked about the exodus of jobs from the region.

“Bethlehem Steel shut down,” he said. “Mack Motors is downsizing drastically. Even the Republicans in this district are disenchanted.”

Senator Clinton’s supporters are hoping for a miracle, hoping she can win big in Pennsylvania, run the table after that, and somehow seize a nomination that looks more and more like it is going to Mr. Obama. If that doesn’t happen, an awful lot of white working-class voters across the country will be faced with a stark choice: voting for a Democrat who happens to be black, or voting to continue policies that most no longer believe are in their best economic interests.

All sounds fine so far (though there is another cautionary note about The Rev. Wright, of course, with no mention of Hagee or Parsley on the McCain side, as you might expect).

However, Herbert sums up as follows…

What the Democrats have to worry about are fractures within. The big question is whether the losers in the fight for the nomination will wholeheartedly support the winners. The party was unable to get its act together in 1968 and unite behind Hubert Humphrey, thus opening the door for Richard Nixon. The ramifications of that bitter election are still being felt.

This year, whether the nominee is Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, the candidate will have to shoulder some pretty heavy negatives in the general election. If the Clinton camp is unwilling to go to the mat for an Obama candidacy, or vice versa, it will be the Republicans who, despite the long odds, will be kicking back in the White House yet again next January.

How many ways can one dissect the idiocy?

For starters, comparing this election to the one forty years ago is nonsense to a degree that I can barely comprehend. The election that highly turbulent year saw two assassinations of much-loved public figures, the third-party candidacy of a bona fide racist (George C. Wallace), the entry into the campaign of the vice president (Hubert Humphrey) due to the resignation of the incumbent war-time president from office (Lyndon Johnson, who was a Democrat of course, as opposed to Incurious George) with Humphrey winning the nomination despite a thrown-together, last-minute campaign, and battles between police and demonstrators outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Also, both sides jockeyed for an end to the Vietnam War in terms favorable to them shortly before the election, with Humphrey calling for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and distancing himself from LBJ in October, and Repug nominee and eventual winner Richard Nixon using an intermediary to delay peace talks around that time until he was sworn into office.

Now, do you read any parallels between what I just described and the 2008 election? I didn’t think so; also, Herbert again raises the straw man of Clinton deciding not to support Obama or the other way around depending on who wins the nomination, when in reality the only intra-party opposition I hear is coming from the Repugs.

As Atrios has said, among others, the Times, for the most part (barring Paul Krugman at least) is more of a paper that “endorses the status quo” in its editorial writing, whatever it perceives that to be, than a source for news that actually advocates anything approximating a liberal or progressive agenda. And Herbert’s column today is still more proof.

(By the way, kudos to Google: just out of curiosity, I did a search on “1968, Democrat, presidential, election” when doing my research, and it asked me, “Do you mean Democratic?”).

Never forget the “ic,” people (here).