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Paper Ballots

Voters believe the media favors Obama—and if newspaper endorsements are any indication, they’re right.

By Michael Miner

October 30, 2008

Sit down before you read this. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of American voters believe the media wants Barack Obama to be elected president.

Here’s what I think is startling about that. Most polls, and most polls of polls (this election’s contribution to the science of opinion research), say Obama is leading handily among the electorate. So it seems Pew is telling us that a lot of Americans are willing to support a candidate even if the loathsome media supports him too. Maybe we ink-stained wretches aren’t as despised as we think we are.

And here’s what’s exciting about the Pew findings. We now know it’s possible for 70 percent of the American voting public to agree on something without being wrong.

Obama has rolled up the press like jitterbuggers rolling up a rec room rug. Not only have the dailies that always endorse the Democrat endorsed another, but reliably Republican papers have taken an existential leap into contrariness—have done so, in fact, with the kind of giddy, noisy delight that tells us they want the grown-ups sitting around the pool to applaud them for their derring-do.

Editor & Publisher is keeping tabs, and it reported Tuesday that the Obama-Biden ticket was leading McCain-Palin in daily newspaper endorsements by a margin of 222 to 93. Four years ago John Kerry nudged George Bush 213 endorsements to 205. At least 43 papers that backed Bush four years ago are now backing Obama, while just four switched in the other direction.

When the Chicago Tribune endorsed a Democrat for the first time in its history it explained that by backing Obama it was keeping faith with Abraham Lincoln. No paper’s going to top that, but others backing Obama have made sure readers knew they were witnessing history.

“Obama’s intellect, temperament and ability to inspire are precisely what we need after a disastrous eight years under George W. Bush,” spake the News-Register, serving McMinnville, Oregon, and the rest of the Yamhill Valley. The editorial was so momentous publisher Jeb Bladine, grandson of the founder, felt compelled to write an essay discussing it. “In 80 years since Lars E. Bladine purchased the then-Telephone-Register—and doubtless long before that—this newspaper has never endorsed a Democrat for president of the United States,” he wrote.

“Until today.”

He continued with a burst of candor rare among newspaper barons: “Others on our editorial board passionately believe that Barack Obama, not John McCain, should become our 44th president. By power of ownership, I could have overturned that vote. But much as I believe in a moderate Republican philosophy, I also see the need for dramatic action seeking to break the deadlock and malice that has marred our political landscape for too long.”

Bladine found refuge in numbers. “There is interesting company in the boat we chose to row,” he went on. “Last week, the Record of Stockton, Calif., gave its first support of a Democrat for president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Obama was also endorsed by Wick Allison,” former publisher of the National Review, “that bastion of conservative political philosophy founded by the late William F. Buckley Jr.”

In Stockton, the Record had this to say: “For eight years, American politics has been marked by smears, fears and greed. For too long, we’ve practiced partisanship in Washington, not politics. The result is a cynicism every bit as deep as that which infected the nation when Richard Nixon was shamed from office and when Bill Clinton brought shame to the office. This must end, but John McCain can’t do it.”

Editor Mike Klocke decided an occasion this astonishing deserved “historical perspective,” and in an accompanying column he favored readers with highlights from past endorsements, reliably Republican all the way back to 1944: “Which of these two men—the third-term candidate or Wendell Willkie—can best be trusted to follow the democratic dictates of the election? The Record advocates the election of Wendell L. Willkie.”

The endorsement that most closely anticipated the Record’s call to elect Obama and redeem the nation appeared in 1968: “Richard M. Nixon’s time has come. The hour has struck when America desperately needs him to elevate the national spirit, to direct the nation’s purpose, to make the United States whole again.”

In College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, the local paper began its Obama endorsement on this note: “In the past 50 years, The Eagle has never recommended a Democrat for president.” When it could not bring itself to favor the Republican ticket, such as in 1960 and 1964, when Texas’s own Lyndon Johnson was on the Democratic ballot, it endorsed nobody. But “this year is different,” said the Eagle. “Every 20 or 30 years or so, a leader comes along who understands that change is necessary if the country is to survive and thrive. . . . Barack Obama is such a leader.”

Republican papers endorsing Obama know they’ll take their lumps. “What a shocker, the Record chooses Obama,” snickered an online commenter who’d apparently waited 72 years for the local rag to show its true colors. In McMinnville, a reader set the News-Register straight by pointing out that “Obama is a far-left liberal who is essentially a socialist who is basically a communist.” And at the Eagle home page someone asserted, “There is no way a sane person will vote for obama unless they are a pro-marxist, pro-communism, pro-castro type regime.”

Despite such disparagements, the enthusiasm among reliably Republican papers to kick off the traces has the mark of a contagion. In Hartford, Connecticut, the Courant, a Tribune Company paper, began its endorsement this way: “In its 244-year history, The Courant has endorsed only one Democratic candidate for president, Bill Clinton. Today we endorse a second Democrat, Sen. Barack Obama.”

In fact, the Courant backed Clinton twice. In other words, and with all due respect to the paper’s history, the longest of any daily in America, this was the third time in the past five elections it had supported the Democrat. But there’s nothing gloriously transgressive in putting it that way.

Alaska’s largest newspaper, of course, also endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket. “Despite her formidable gifts,” said the Anchorage Daily News of the state’s own Sarah Palin, “few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range.”

Palin was a godsend to editorial writers penning Obama endorsements for Republican papers. The Courant: “Most worrisome, however, is Mr. McCain’s choice of a running mate . . . who is not yet ready for prime time.” The Record: “[McCain’s] selection of Palin as a running mate was appalling.” The Eagle: “She is a candidate of little intellectual curiosity who appears to be hopelessly unready to be president.” The News-Register: “What could McCain have been thinking . . . ?”

Without Palin, some historically Republican editorial pages might have struggled to find words to reject McCain that their readers would accept, and perhaps even endorsed him against their better judgment. But now they can make the argument they believe in, knowing they’ve got Palin to nail it down. She signs, seals, and delivers the case for dumping the GOP. She’s the closer.

Kass Sees Darkness at the Break of Noon

When your emotions are intense but inchoate, thank God if you’re a folksinger. You get to fiddle with the mike, take a long, mournful look at the house, twang a string or two, and warn that “a hard rain’s gonna fall” or snicker that “something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

The house listens in rapt silence. No one can say exactly what you’re talking about, but the words seem so right.

John Kass has a lot on his mind. America’s in turmoil, and he’s got deep misgivings. But instead of a stool in a dimly lit coffeehouse, Kass has page two of the Sunday Trib, where the lights are bright and logic comes first.

“On those nights when they were young,” he wrote on October 26, “they smoked pot in the streets and listened to Dylan in the car and dreamed of the risks they’d take.” But they’re much older now, “and they rush toward the warm embrace of big government and promised security.” In Kass’s vision, the boomers grew up to be a generation of nervous Mister Joneses, and there are so many of them they can turn their fears into laws and governments.

There’s a song in there somewhere.

And now the government has sunk its fangs into the financial industry, and when bureaucrats are running high finance the dreamers with big ideas won’t stand a chance. “The entrepreneurial mind isn’t willing to settle and wants to make more than $250,000 in salary or whatever the federal government deems proper,” wrote Kass. “They don’t want proper. What they want is to take risks and reach the American Dream. [But] when they get close to victory they’ll get whacked with tax increases and the rug will be pulled out from under them.”

There could be a song in there too—an angry “Ballad of Joe the Plumber.”

The column was a cry from Kass’s heart. “Will our children speak of liberty, as we once did before we forgot?” he asked, in clear torment. “These days, liberty isn’t in vogue. It’s so, so olde.” He closed with a parable about how to catch a wild pig. It’s such a powerful parable that I believe it’s earned a song of its own, a Wild Pig Song that will exhilarate us even though we have our doubts about the metaphor.

Last weekend some people I knew in high school came over for dinner—all of us refugees from one of a red state’s more conservative suburbs. We talked economics just long enough to establish that everyone was getting wiped out, and we also talked about race. It isn’t fear that’s made us want to vote for Obama. My freshman year was the first year the black kids in town got to go to the white schools. Obama was someone we never expected to see in our lifetimes.

So I sympathize with Kass—the election has also stirred up feelings in me that are a little too much for words to express. Maybe we should go in on a guitar.   

For more on the media, see Michael Miner’s blog, News Bites.

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