And another thing ... Part of what gets on my wick about the Purdum analysis piece (below)—Purdum, by the way, is the hack responsible for this heartwarming tale of family struggle and triumph, thx Body and Soul for the link—is its entirely unconscious employment of a type of rhetorical obscurantism in which the media is made to all but disappear from a scene it does a vast amount to determine:

In the end, Iowa did what its defenders say it does best: It tested the candidates, over many months, first in small settings and then in a media glare, and revealed weaknesses that were not initially clear and strengths that only gradually became apparent.

Never mind the rather sonorous periods of that sentence. (Really, for prose rhythm it's not bad, as newspaper writing goes.) We have a rhetoric of logical progression and natural development: latent things (strengths and weaknesses) are made manifest as we move from small stages to large. The only agent in the process is a mystical, synecdochic "Iowa." Are there actual people and institutions actually doing things anywhere in that rhetoric? Might any of them be affiliated with the press?

"Media glare" is cliche enough to go unnoticed, but it indicates the tendency: media, in this rhetoric, is a fact of the environment, a simple and inevitable part of the ecology of the campaign. We aren't supposed to think of the media in its institutional capacity—an estate (to recur to a cliche you don't often hear anymore), a privileged set of players in the democratic game, who have their own internal politics and pursue their own individual and corporate agendas in the larger world. The press itself refuses to think of itself this way, to see itself as an actor on the stage: it strikes me that the Times' hard-and-fast rule that reporters avoid the first person or any disclosure of their presence as an observer isn't just a writerly decorum, it's a form of ideological training—pretend, till it becomes second nature, that you (and the interests you serve) are extraneous to the picture.

Purdum's account is a form of magical thinking: "organization" is trumped by "momentum," Kerry wins because he somehow "changes the subject" and "reveals" things about himself and Dean to the mind of the electorate, free of any apparent process of mediation—and entirely in the absence of any other interested parties.

I don't see how any honest person who wanted to analyze the results of a Presidential primary could simply elide the fact of the media and the effect of the media's agendas on what campaigns do and how they do it. And I think it's a form of institutional corruption that has the Times offering its reporters—like Purdum here, like Jodi Wilgoren (below, and popping up again today with an analysis of Dean's Iowa defeat), as supposedly dispassionate commentators on a political process that they have materially affected, and will continue to affect, in their reporting. Then again, this is the age of the pundit ...

posted by michael  6:07:57 PM  
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Instant analysis is almost always worth the time it takes to produce it, and Todd S. Purdum's article today ("Shattering Iowa Myths") is no exception to the rule. Here's the top of the piece:

For Iowa Democrats, Senator John Kerry showed himself to be what he has argued all along he was: the reassuring establishment candidate with the war hero's record, solid policy positions and broad experience in government to be a strong challenger to President Bush. He shattered conventional Iowa wisdom that organization is all.

Shattered the conventional wisdom. That last sentence is complete and utter horseshit. The Iowa caucuses are a statewide, precinct-level set of mini-conventions, the site of a complex, distributed process of deliberation and horse-trading. It's not "conventional wisdom" that organization is all in such a process; it's a fact of the process itself. Kerry and Edwards didn't win because, in some magic way, "organization" got pushed aside as a determining factor this time around in Iowa. They won because their organizations were better adapted to take advantage of the particular circumstances that obtained on the ground at the moment of the election. (One of the key circumstances, possibly, being the relative seasoning and savvy of the troops themselves running the caucus operations, an area in which the more establishment politicians seem to have had the upper hand. Check out Jerome Armstrong's illuminating short post to that effect on Daily Kos, as well as Tom Schaller's "first cut at deconstruction" of the results—scroll down to the graf that begins "But let me tell you exactly what I saw in Precinct 63" to get to the real reportorial meat. Both these guys were on scene for the caucuses, and both accounts beat anything I've seen yet in the mass media.)

And God knows, Purdum's analysis has nothing to do with upsetting the important conventional wisdom. The media have been holding open a "Presidential" slot for somebody other than Dean to occupy for some time; watch now as the counters slide into place:

In [Kerry's] final weeks of frantic campaigning ... he managed to change the subject from perceived doubts about his own personality—often caricatured as cold and uncomfortable—and his will to win into questions about whether Dr. Dean's temperament was too hot to make him electable. At his post-caucus rally Monday night, Dr. Dean looked more like Howard Beale, the angry anchor in "Network," than "Marcus Welby, M.D.," while Mr. Kerry was every inch the veteran senator he is.
   "John Kerry is the one who has that presidential way about him," said Artelle Payne, a retired liquor wholesaler in Waukee, echoing the words of Mr. Kerry's own stump speech and scores of voters interviewed on their way into caucuses.

If Dean loses, it's because he's angry—that's the permanent factesque truth about him, after all— and naturally whoever beats him is going to do so because he's "presidentially" un-angry. For now, that's Kerry: whose personality flaws (in addition to being "cold and uncomfortable", he's also weird and a liar) are just hovering there, waiting for the moment when the story will demand that they be deployed.

Analysis? I don't know whether Todd S. Purdum is otherwise capable of thought, but this lazy diddling around with received iconography sure as hell doesn't demonstrate any. The myths are shattered! Long live the myth!

posted by michael  12:14:46 PM  
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