Two Political Stories, Hold the False Equivalence

Something truly remarkable is underway in party politics at the moment. One of our national parties has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, and its future on the national level looks worse than its past. It is losing badly among the largest bloc of voters, women (who went for Obama over Romney 56-44 last year); and among the fastest-growing blocs of voters -- Latinos, young voters, Asians, the tech elite, etc -- it is losing by even more.

Yet all of the energy, pressure, and big personalities in this party -- and, you've guessed, I am talking about the Republicans -- are pushing it closer to its fervent but outnumbered base and away from more centrist positions and candidates who might give it a better national-election chance. That's the story behind the primary challenges that knocked off the likes of Dick Lugar and gave us the likes of Todd Akin. It's the story of the repeated debt-ceiling showdowns and filibuster abuse, plus the vote to eliminate Food Stamps. It's the story behind the intra-mural GOP struggle over the immigration bill. The party's Super-ego, in the approximate form of the Bush family (plus business allies, some evangelicals, etc; and technically maybe all these amounting to Ego) is pushing for approval. The party's Id is doing everything it can to resist.

This contest will be chronicled in our histories -- but, as I've pointed out once or twice, it poses surprising challenges for mainstream journalism of the moment, given reporters' strong instinct to remain "fair" by keeping equal distance from the main parties' views.

Here are two illustrations of what you can do if you work free of that impulse. One is from Thomas Edsall, on the NYT's Opinionator blog, who examines the struggle between Republicans concerned about the party's national ambitions and those appealing to, or fearful of, the hard-line local base. Sample:

"Their rigidity is killing them. It's either holy purity, or you are anathema," Tom Korologos, a premier Republican lobbyist and the ambassador to Belgium under George W. Bush, said in a phone interview. "Too many ideologues have come in. You don't win by what they are doing."

A number of prominent figures in the Republican Party share this harsh view. Jeb Bush warned last year that both Ronald Reagan and his own father would have a "hard time" fitting into the contemporary Republican Party, which he described as dominated by "an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement."

The other is from Rich Yeselson, who argues today in Politico that while freshman Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has essentially no chance of carrying the Electoral College and becoming President in 2016, he nonetheless has a plausible chance of becoming the party's nominee. Sample:

So it's best to think of Cruz as the perfect expression of what Perry and Rubio were mere beta versions: the exemplification, brilliantly articulated, of the fringe pathologies trapped in the body of a major party that is today's GOP. Cruz is the real deal. He is deeply grounded in his worldview, and skilled in his presentation of it. He's the man that rightwing activists must wish had started his national political career just a few years earlier: Is there any doubt that Ted Cruz would have been a more daunting challenger for Mitt Romney than the charlatans and bozos Romney defeated for the 2012 nomination?

It doesn't take much imagination to envision a titanic faceoff in 2016 between Cruz and the round mound of Trenton town, Chris Christie, his only peer in sheer political talent and chutzpah among the other GOP presidential contenders.

My point in highlighting these articles, apart from their respective merits, is not to ask for more attitude or partisan bias in reporting. Rather it is to illustrate the adjustments "responsible" journalism is having to make to reflect the actual reality of our politics now. We know for certain that people looking back on our era, a generation from now, will be asking "What happened to the Republicans in the post-Lehman, post-Bush age?" Journalism might as well begin grappling with that question now.