Democrats Are Not Helpless Victims Of Forces Beyond Their Control

They just show little appetite to shape events—and news coverage of events—in ways that would help them and hurt Republicans.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In just the past couple weeks I’ve heard several political professionals—Democrats and media figures alike—lament or observe something like this: Joe Biden built a pretty good head of steam after his feisty State of the Union address, but then pro-Palestinian campus protests, and the response from various school administrators and city and state officials blunted his momentum. 

What terrible luck! Or, to critics of his Middle East policy, what better evidence that he should withdraw U.S. support for Israel. In either case, whether it was happenstance or attributable to matters within Biden’s control, the damage was real. He stopped climbing in the polls.

I think this view sells Republicans short, or requires downplaying the effectiveness of their methods. And the upshot is to hold Democrats harmless for their political misfortunes or chalk it all up to the fractiousness of the party’s coalition. But take a step back and it’s clear there was more going on: If Joe Biden has indeed been set back politically by the protests, it’s because they were all over television and social media, feeding a general sense of disorder and (depending on audience) rising left-wing extremism, campus antisemitism, or Democratic complicity in free-speech crackdowns. Policy hadn’t changed—if anything Biden continues to move in the direction of the protesters. But the salience of the issue and its divisiveness had increased.

Now ask: Why were were they on TV a lot?

One reason is that Columbia University, which became a metonym for Palestinian activism nationwide, happens to be in New York City, where many media elites live. Another more important one is that Republicans spent many weeks sowing the wind precisely so that the ensuing whirlwind would engulf their opponents. 

Long before the encampments formed, Republicans on Capitol Hill began making life hell for university administrators, who were grappling with tension between speech codes and campus antiwar activism. They got hauled before widely publicized House hearings and embarrassed under gotcha questioning by Elise Stefanik. Some of them lost their jobs. Many of the rest learned the obvious but incorrect lesson that avoiding public blowback entailed appeasing their GOP tormentors. Then when the encampments formed, the same Republicans inserted themselves into the story, making foils of the protestors and the administrators alike, equating them quite falsely with Democrats and Joe Biden, and demanding the protests be disbanded by force. State-level Republican officeholders, along with a variety of campus administrators and even Democratic mayors heeded those demands, though not the maximalist call to activate National Guard forces. So ensued dramatic scenes of riot police manhandling students and journalists, viral audio and video of protesters and counter-protesters behaving badly, and—the culminating success—public commencement ceremonies canceled just days before graduation. Thanks, Joe Biden.

DRASTIC TIMES, DRASTIC MEASURES

This didn’t just turn into a media sensation because Columbia happens to be in New York—it turned into a media sensation because it was a dramatic showdown, drenched in partisan controversy, just as Republicans intended. 

That’s not to say they staged anything or engineered everything in some conspiratorial way. They simply threw the full weight of their bodies, including their official powers, at the goal of making Gaza protests a Problem For Democrats. They situated themselves to capitalize on unrest, then encouraged unrest. It entailed a great deal of bad faith and affected outrage, but also real, strategic commitment. And it succeeded. 

Why can’t two play at this game? At least the good-faith half?

In the nine years since Donald Trump’s first candidacy began, I’ve written a lot of media criticism, and even more about the good and bad of the anti-Trump movement. One of the formulations I landed on to merge these genres was: Mainstream political journalists should do better, but Democrats, knowing how media works, should exploit its weaknesses much like Republicans do.

Over the past week, I and other media writers have scrutinized a revealing interview between Semafor’s Ben Smith and New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn. Why is Kahn, and thus the Times, treating democracy like a third-tier issue among many policy issues, when democracy isn’t even a policy per se but the foundation of all legitimate policymaking? Does he really mean to say that polling should drive editorial judgment?

To some obvious degree, the media’s months-long campus fixation undercuts his defense of the Times’s political coverage and his suggestion that it’s rooted in some kind of neutral methodology. The presidency of Harvard is by no means a top-tier issue for voters. Neither is campus protest activity and, if you view the data literally, neither is Israel’s war on Gaza. All of that is true even if Columbia happens to be a short subway ride uptown from Times HQ.

But I don’t think that really explains the paper’s obsession with the issue, let alone the broader media’s. Harvard isn’t in New York, and campus activity in DC, where plenty of journalists live, got much less national news coverage than activity at the ivies. What made it a capital-I issue, or a capital-C controversy were Republican efforts to exploit it for partisan campaign purposes. They showed up at Columbia. They took direct aim at Harvard. And so a national firestorm ensued.

At some level, the Democrats and media figures who treat the issue as if it fell out of the sky, or as a Problem For Biden, understand this. Democrats are bracing for more GOP congressional antics, where Republicans will use their official powers to fan the false impression that the Democratic Party and its base are the real hotbeds of antisemitism. They’re further bracing for a separate hearing Republicans intend to hold with Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR who also happens to have tweeted quite a bit over the years about her progressive politics. 

Democrats and their allies in progressive media know these hearings are damaging, or have the potential to be. But they also often act as if they represent some form of black magic available only to Republicans. Try to suggest that congressional hearing rooms and stunty press conferences are vital if underutilized implements in the Democratic toolkit, and they’ll ignore you, or mock you, or treat you like an idiot. I have receipts going back years. But they’re wrong, and I’m right. 

ABRIDGE OF SPIES

You can chalk up the trauma of the 2016 election to a pervasive false-sense of security. Nobody thought Trump would win, so everyone—both individuals with immense power and millions of regular voters—acted as though he couldn’t.

But the current election, and to some extent the unexpectedly narrow margin of the 2020 election, are demoralizing to liberals because that element of naïveté is gone, and yet Trump remains formidable. Democrats are worried about what another Trump presidency would mean, but they’re also stunned by what the numbers keep telling them: We’re losing to that?

I’d encourage liberals who feel this way to imagine what would happen in a mass-market Hollywood film about a well-meaning protagonist who came to the same realization. Would he just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting better sense to prevail? Or would he switch tactics, and come up with a new plan to stage a comeback?

My longstanding frustration with Democrats stems from the fact that they’re doing the first thing. I’m relieved to see Biden chastise journalists for underplaying the most important stakes of the election (the media really should do better!) but he and (more importantly) the other leaders of his party are simply not providing any of the high drama they know political media relies on to fuel stories into firestorms.

In just the past week, the Republican National Committee pushed out its top election lawyer, Charlie Spies, because Donald Trump deemed him too unwilling to peddle and act upon the Big Lie. It simultaneously filed a lawsuit in Nevada aimed at throwing out any ballots that have not been counted by midnight on election day, knowing that these are overwhelmingly Democratic mail ballots.

If I ran the New York Times I would know how to turn this into a matter of public urgency all on my own. The dramatic elements—the scheming, the corruption, the villainy—are right out in the open. Splashy front page headlines write themselves. Even if these GOP efforts are likely to fail, they expose the dark heart of the modern American right, and its hostility to free and fair elections. It’s a big, big story. 

The Times did not treat it as such. But part of the reason is that Stefanik has no equal-and-opposite in the Senate Democratic caucus or the executive branch: No one in Democratic leadership or the Justice Department insisting these ballots will be counted, no one summoning Spies for his testimony, no one placing hearings on the calendar to expose the GOP’s nefarious schemes. 

Just days ago we learned that Trump appealed to the nation’s oil executives with outright pay-to-play corruption: raise a billion dollars for my campaign and I’ll let you write our environmental rules. The quid and the quo both explicit. I would bet a modest sum of money that this, too, will go uninvestigated. Used in ads and campaign literature? Sure. But fully scandalized as the selling-off of the U.S. government to right-wing oligarchs? That would require the wizened Democrats of the Senate to do more than just tweet and issue press releases.

Donald Trump is currently on trial for using fraudulent means to coverup a one-night stand he had with a porn star. She testified this week about how Trump left her sexually unsatisfied and regretful, and why she called him an “orange turd.” Using these kinds of revelations to redefine Trump as a limp wannabe should be easy—it wouldn’t even require Democrats to use any official power. But they show little interest. Meanwhile Republican claims that the trial in New York state court is secretly orchestrated out of Biden’s Justice Department carom across people’s media transoms, the Republican attorney general of Missouri is abusing his official powers to create the false appearance of a coverup.

Yet again, only one is playing at this game.

We’ve heard a lot over the past couple weeks about Biden’s reluctance to grant an interview to the New York Times—about whether that would be a valuable use of his time, whether he should treat it as a rite of passage, whether the mainstream media’s influence is too diminished, its audience already too liberal, to make it of much use to Democrats seeking harder-to-reach voters. Not enough of the discourse has centered on this: The pricelessness of driving media narratives that are politically useful, acting and manipulating events in ways that might yield headlines that scream scandal. Biden and Democrats may be right about the first part—right to place a Times interview low on their priority list and right to scold the White House press corps for obsessing over trivia. But insofar as they’ve given up on the idea that they, too, can influence what media elites come to view as important, they’ve made a huge, fateful error.