A 2007 Media Matters report demonstrated that despite the near-constant insistence by members of the media that this is a conservative or "center-right" country, "Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they're growing more progressive all the time."
Since then, the evidence that this is a progressive nation has only increased. Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections, including Barack Obama's landslide victory last November. Democrats control both houses of Congress, with the largest majority either party has enjoyed in decades. Public polling continues to show widespread support for progressive policy proposals.
And yet the news media continue to insist that America is a "center-right" nation. They offer increasingly tortured justifications for this position, like Tom Brokaw's invocation of the total land mass of counties carried by John McCain -- as if the number of rocks and trees and blades of grass in counties McCain won is more important than the number of people who preferred Obama.
The notion of America as a fundamentally conservative nation is so ingrained in the minds of our media elite that CNN's John King found himself arguing that "the electorate voted for Barack Obama but still perceives him to be a liberal. ... The last thing you want to do if you want to keep them four years from now is to alienate them with a liberal agenda." Of course, another possibility is that if the electorate voted for Barack Obama while perceiving him as a liberal, maybe the electorate is liberal, too. But that thought didn't seem to cross King's mind.
Just this week, Politico's Glenn Thrush provided another example of false media assumptions about the public's policy views. Thrush wrote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's support for public funding for contraceptives would play into Republican efforts to portray her as a "Bay Area liberal" pursuing a "far left agenda." Just one problem: Public funding for contraceptives is really, really popular. How popular? Eighty-six percent of Americans support such funding, according to a 2005 poll conducted by a Republican polling firm. Pelosi's support for contraceptive funding doesn't make her look, as Thrush indicated, "far left" -- to the contrary, the conservatives who oppose it make up a tiny, far-right minority of Americans.
You'd think reporters would have learned a lesson from the Terri Schiavo story. When Republican politicians first decided they, not Schiavo's husband, should make decisions about medical care for the woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, much of the media assumed that the public agreed with the GOP -- and that the matter would play to their political benefit. That wasn't true.
So when reporters and pundits clamor for "bipartisan compromise" on "moderate, centrist" solutions, they do so based on a mistaken belief about where the "center" really is -- in effect, arguing for conservative positions that they believe to be centrist. And when faced with party-line votes, they blame Democrats for not compromising enough, falsely assuming the Democrats to be the party that is further from the center.
Looking back at that press briefing by Robert Gibbs, we see examples: Gibbs was asked if Obama "need[ed] to be twisting arms of Democrats to get them to take the idea of bipartisan support more seriously" and "Democrats on the Hill don't seem to be serious about it. Is he applying pressure on them to get them into the fold here?" But he wasn't asked a single question premised on the possibility that it was the Republicans who weren't serious about bipartisanship.
After the bill passed without Republican votes, Time's Mark Halperin blasted Obama for failing to pursue "centrist compromises":
HALPERIN: The other thing he could have done -- when you say, "What could he have done?" -- you can go for centrist compromises. You can say to your own party, "Sorry, some of you liberals aren't going to like it, but I'm going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority rather than an all-Democratic vote." He chose not to do that. That's the exact path that George Bush took for most of his presidency with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems.
This is simply nonsense. The stimulus bill included a mixture of spending and Republican-friendly tax cuts. Provisions Republicans objected to -- including that wildly popular contraceptive funding -- were dropped. Obama and the Democrats, in other words, did compromise. It was a "centrist" bill -- Mark Halperin just doesn't realize it because he has no idea where the "center" is. He seems to think for something to be "centrist," it must be supported by congressional Republicans. But congressional Republicans aren't centrists, and their policy positions don't enjoy broad support.
Meanwhile, the congressional Republicans offered their own alternative stimulus bill. It was completely -- 100 percent -- tax cuts. Nothing else.
So, to sum up: The Democrats -- who won landslide electoral victories in both 2006 and 2008 and whose policy positions enjoy broad public support -- offered a bill that included a mix of tax cuts and spending, that removed provisions the Republicans didn't like. The Republicans, having lost badly in the past two elections and enjoying about as much popularity as a kick in the head, offered a bill that consisted solely of their own priority, tax cuts.
And yet the Mark Halperins of the world blast Obama and the Democrats for not compromising enough. Absolutely incredible.
The media's insistence that Democrats, but not Republicans, must constantly make concessions in order to be "centrist" and "bipartisan" is also evident in one of the most persistent media myths in modern political history.
In 1992, anti-abortion Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey wanted to speak at the Democratic convention -- but he did not want to endorse the party's presidential nominee; he wanted instead to attack the party's position on abortion. Other Democrats who opposed abortion rights were allowed to speak at the convention, but Casey was not given a platform to attack his party.
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