Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Brian Beutler is encouraged by the debate between Hillary and Barack about foriegn policy, but disgusted by the media reaction:

Certainly what you're hearing from Clinton and Obama is a healthier debate than what you're hearing from journalists. Clinton's basic position is that Obama has, by announcing his intent to engage enemy leaders, proven that he's too naive to set the country's foreign policy. Obama, on the other hand, contends that Clinton's foreign policy ideas are too similar to George Bush's for comfort. As far as I'm concerned, I think Obama's argument is basically correct and Hillary's argument is totally nuts, but in any case both arguments are pretty close facsimiles to what the two candidates actually believe about foreign policy.

The press, on the other hand, is doing exactly what you'd expect. Conservatives are saying exactly what you'd expect--that Hillary's correct, and that diplomacy is bad and that nobody will ever support Obama's idea. David Brooks wrote, "He continues to attract huge crowds and huge money, but he also continues to make rookie mistakes, like saying he’d talk with Hugo Chávez." Charles Krauthammer wrote,

For Barack Obama, it was strike two. And this one was a right-down-the-middle question from a YouTuber in Monday night's South Carolina debate:

"Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during
the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else,
with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?"

"I would," responded Obama.

Liberals, of course, responded as they always do--by neglecting to evaluate the merits of the two positions and offering instead a maddeningly typical meta-analysis of the argument--one that defaults with 100 percent regularity to the idea that only hawkish ideas seem serious.

Matthew Yglesias concurs:

There are a lot of ways in which the progressive punditocracy is more admirable than the conservative one, but this really and truly isn't one. The candidates, as Brian says, are for the first time having an exchange that at least seems to reveal something about their approach to foreign policy and ideas about how the United States of America should relate to other countries. This would be a good time for progressive journalists to try to provide their audience with arguments about who's right, arguments that, if persuasive, could shift the direction of public policy. The amateur-hour political analysis is silly -- as is always the case, Obscure Political Controversy X will prove politically damaging to Candidate A if and only if the press gives Candidate A negative press coverage as a result of OPC-X.

It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks, of course, since it leads to a lot of flailing when you finally get your hands on the reins. And it's maddening if you're the kind of journalist who cares more about policy than the political horse-race. But if you don't get the power, you'll be left with a shiny set of policy prescriptions gathering dust on your mantle.

In other words, you could end up as a libertarian.

Posted by Jane Galt at July 27, 2007 10:11 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links