Biden and Harris have both embraced a strategy of refusing press conferences and interviews with adversarial journalists. When you bring this up, each has a ready answer.
Don’t Get Obama-ed Again
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Barack Obama’s 2008 run, a classic identity play, emphasized the history-making potential of electing the nation’s first Black president. No one knew or cared much about Obama’s policy positions, and he didn’t bother to share them. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids were policy arguments focused around a succinct set of issues: student loan debt, the minimum wage and healthcare. The fact that he would have been the first Jewish president was scarcely noticed.
If I were one of the Democratic strategists advising Kamala Harris’ rump 2024 campaign for president, I would focus on an identity play emphasizing her race and gender over a run about a set of policies. Which is exactly what she’s doing. “The longer the Harris campaign can portray her as a cultural phenomenon,” The New York Times reported on July 31st, “the longer she can avoid articulating details of her policy agenda that could divide her support…For now, the Harris team intends to skip some of the traditional markers of a presidential bid. While Ms. Harris released a host of policy papers during her 2020 campaign—some of which she has since disavowed—this time she plans to cast herself as a policy extension of Mr. Biden’s administration.”
“I think we are three weeks from knowing whether she can ascend the Obama ladder to where it’s about her and not any specific policies she has,” Rick Davis, campaign manager for McCain in 2008, told the Times.
If Kamala Harris can get elected without making policy promises, good for her. But we, as individual voters, have different interests than she does.
“I’m with her,” a Hillary Clinton campaign slogan quickly adopted by Kamala Harris supporters, is exactly the opposite of what representative democracy is supposed to be about. She should be watching our backs. A politician ought to be there for us, fighting like hell to improve our lives.
Just as Harris is attempting to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, long on charisma and short on specifics. Progressives and other leftists who gave him their votes quickly learned that being young, Black and cool enough to enjoy weed is no guarantee that a candidate will govern any better or differently than a boring old white guy. As president, Obama did exactly what a Republican would have done. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he called abortion rights “not the highest legislative priority”), granted full immunity to Guantánamo torturers, sent tens of thousands of more troops to the losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 times more than Bush and supported the military coup against the democratically-elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.
Obama’s decision to bail out Wall Street but not Main Street after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis prompted pissed-off progressives to form the Occupy Wall Street movement in late 2011. True to right-wing form, Obama had his Homeland Security department partner with Wall Street banks, real estate companies, local police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush hundreds of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.
Obama is still a rock star. But he gravely wounded the Democratic Party. Obamaism led directly to the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign—and the intraparty schism that allowed Donald Trump’s surprise win.
Let’s not get fooled again. If the left-leaning Democrats who comprise the majority of the party’s voters want to avoid getting conned into supporting another DINO like Obama, they must insist upon a clear and coherent policy agenda for a first Harris Administration. “She is not Trump” is not enough. Nor is “we need a Black woman president.” By those standards, we could have elected Condoleezza Rice.
We don’t know nearly enough about Harris’s stances on the issues. The little we have learned so far on matters like Gaza (she supports Israel), universal healthcare (she’s against it) and the long-frozen minimum wage (she doesn’t talk about it) doesn’t give much reason for optimism from a leftist point of view.
It’s been more than two weeks since she became the Democratic standardbearer. Yet she still refuses to give any press conferences—something every candidate and every president ought to do daily, 365 days a year—or interviews with reporters. Like the senile Biden, every word she utters in public is read off a Teleprompter.
If she won’t tell us what she thinks, and we don’t like what she says, she shouldn’t get our votes.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
FDR and Biden Are Exactly the Same
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Democrats and their media allies are currently comparing the legislative agenda of Joe Biden to the sweeping ambition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there’s really no comparison.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: By Law the President Should Have to Give Daily Press Conferences
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News conferences are a double oxymoron. Pressers aren’t conferences; conferences involve back-and-forth communication. Nor do they have anything to do with news. News is neither created nor conveyed at a press conference.
The one place in the world where news is least likely to happen is a press conference. If I were in charge of a media organization the last thing I’d spend money on would be a White House correspondent whose role is to sit politely holding up his or her hand, hoping like a compliant schoolchild to be called upon, begging for the privilege of being lied to.
Though there was that time an Iraqi journalist tried to bean George W. Bush with his shoe. Muntadhar al-Zaidi. He’s a journalist. And that was a news-making press conference.
Whatever CNN paid Jim Acosta to transcribe Donald Trump’s BS was too much. Even so, we owe Acosta for pushing the president so far that he yanked his reporter’s press pass in a fit of pique. With a brusque instruction to his despicable minister of propaganda Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump simultaneously exposed his authoritarian personality so that none could deny it. Even Fox News was alarmed, joining CNN’s (probably doomed) lawsuit against the president. “Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized,” quoth Fox’s Chris Wallace.
Trump threatened to revoke more White House press passes should his journalistic stenographers displease him.
The Acosta affair has convinced me of something I’ve been mulling for a long time: the president of the United States should be required to hold an hour-long daily press conference. Unless there’s a national emergency like 9/11. Then he can skip a day.
Why, if press conferences are total BS—and they are—should the president have to do them? Because this a democracy. Trump is not a king.
Roman emperors and generals rode through their triumphs next to a slave who whispered “remember you are mortal” in their ears lest their success convince them they were gods. Presidents should be required to host press confabs so they remember that they are not the people’s boss. Presidents are our servants. They are our slaves. They are accountable to we, the people or, the next best thing in this case, the people’s scribes. Presidents owe us answers.
The death of press conferences reflects the dedemocratization of America’s politics and the rise of an imperial attitude that belies the country’s moral and economic decline. During Donald Trump’s first year in office he held just one old-fashioned solo press conference.
The trend has not been a straight line but the overall track is unmistakable. Obama held seven during his first year, Bush 43 had four, Clinton 11, H.W. Bush 27, Reagan six, Carter 22.
JFK held an average of 23 press conferences a year. Track them down on YouTube; the witty banter and jovial self-confidence is a sad reminder of what we’ve lost.
Trump is not a king, American presidents are not kings, but even that comparison of accessibility is unfair—to hereditary monarchs. In many societies kings and queens were expected to clear their schedules for royal audiences where subjects could lodge petitions and plead grievances. These events are depicted in the alt-medieval fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” In India medieval kings, and then Mughal emperors appeared at their balcony for the Jharokha Darshan, a daily audience where the public griped, groused and begged for royal indulgence.
There will be those who argue that the president is too busy to meet the press. Fortunately, there is ample proof that Donald Trump, like Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him, have more than free time to make themselves available. He, like most former presidents, play the hours-long, fake sport of golf.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
SYNDICATED COLUMN: “Our Hearts and Prayers Go Out…”
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When Did Post-Disaster News Conferences Become Long-Winded Oscar Acceptance Speeches?
This is for you older readers: when did news conferences become long-winded acceptance speeches?
I’m too young to remember for sure, but There must have been a time when, after a train derailment or a tornado or a flood or a race riot or whatever, public officials stepped up to the microphones to deliver a status update (“as soon as we learn more, we’ll let you know”), and perhaps some advice to the public (“avoid downed live wires, especially the ones that are sparking, like in that movie The Ice Storm”), answered reporters’ questions and left the stage.
Today’s news conferences are a dreary, undignified mélange of pro forma acknowledgements and sentimental pabulum.
A news conference following this week’s fatal high-speed derailment of an Amtrak passenger train in Philadelphia was a typical example:
SENATOR PAT TOOMEY (R-PA): The scene is a horrific and heartbreaking scene. My prayers go out to the people who lost their lives in this terrible tragedy, to those who were injured, to all of their families. I also want to take a moment to express my appreciation to the first responders, the men and women of this city’s police and fire forces who have responded with such professionalism. Mayor Nutter deserves a great deal of credit. He and his team have pulled together a very, very effective and well-coordinated effort that’s included the federal as well as the city officials. So we appreciate what they’re doing. And we wanted to express both our condolences and our appreciation for that effort. As Senator Casey pointed out, a big part of my being here and his being here is to make sure that Mayor Nutter and city of Philadelphia knows if there’s anything the federal government can be doing to help, we want to make sure it does that.
MAYOR MICHAEL NUTTER (D-Phila.): Senators Casey and Senator Toomey, thank you both. The response at the federal level has been tremendous here. With that in mind, let me also report to you that shortly after the earlier press conference today, I had the honor and opportunity to speak directly with President Barack Obama, who called, wanting to get on-the-ground information and facts. The president is very concerned about what has happened here, expressed his condolences as well, but also pledged the full support of the federal government and all the agencies under the executive branch of the government. The president feels very saddened by what has happened, but he was tremendously supportive and encouraging of our efforts here on the ground. For that, I want to say thank you to President Barack Obama for all of his leadership and support in these difficult and tragic times. With that, let me open to some questions for anything that we can answer.
I’m only picking on Philly because it’s the most recent example. I could quote the same crap, virtually verbatim, from press briefings following 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, you name it. Our prayers always “go out to the victims and their families.” We always praise the sainted “first responders.” If you’re a federal politician, you thank the local hack; if you’re a local politician, you suck up to the leech who just parachuted in from the Beltway.
In pro forma post-bad-things-happening briefings, natural and manmade disasters are heartbreaking, devastating, tragic, incomprehensible, terrible and/or horrific. Crimes of mass violence, especially those committed by terrorists, are always brutal and vicious, cowardly acts. Killing children is always unthinkable.
Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, shortly after the Aurora shootings, after the 2012 Newtown elementary school shootings: “The heart of every person in Colorado goes out to every person in Connecticut.”
Secy. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003, after a helicopter carrying U.S. soldiers crashed in U.S.-occupied Iraq: “My heart and prayers go out to the families and the loved ones of those people.”
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, commenting on the first death from Ebola on U.S. soil: “Our hearts go out to all the families who have been affected and our prayers are with them.”
House Speaker John Boehner after tornadoes killed people in 2014: “Our hearts and our prayers go out to those in Oklahoma who have been victimized by this storm.”
I could fill a book.
It is possible that politicians like President Obama, seen biting his lip in apparent sadness while announcing that one of his drones accidentally killed an American hostage held by Al Qaeda in Pakistan earlier this year, really meant it when he offered his “grief and condolences” to the poor dead SOB’s family…even though he was yukking it up with the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots about “deflategate” a few hours later.
It is possible. But it isn’t likely.
Fair or not cut-and-paste expressions of grief (“our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and their families”) come off as ridiculously insincere — just as fake and phony as those Academy Award-style “I’d like to thank my agent, my children, and my dog” thank-yous while we’re waiting to find out if and when the trains will begin running again.
But you know what’s worse than listening to our lame political class pretend to care? Their low regard for our intelligence, as evidenced by their obvious assumptions that they don’t have to try harder, and that we believe them.
We may be dumb. But we ain’t stupid.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
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