June 19, 2007

Ceasefire

Schwarzenegger gave what has become his standard stump speech on post-partisanship this morning, but it certainly went over well with the audience at the Annenberg conference, most of whom had not heard it before. It's the one where he talks about the extremes not having a monopoly on principles, that it's principled to compromise for the common good, and he quotes Edmund Burke and JFK on the power of collaboration.

Also on hand were two former Assembly Speakers who had different takes on the question. Willie Brown spoke briefly, reminding folks that he was originally elected speaker with more Republican votes than Democratic votes and in fact a minority of the Democratic caucus. He later became a symbol of overreaching partisanship, although that was probably a bum rap. He was always reaching out to Republican legislators and governors on policy even if his rhetoric was red meat for the left.

Villaraigosa also spoke, and he mentioned that one of the things he did when he took over the Assembly was to shuffle the desks so that all the Democrats were not sitting, literally, on one "side of the aisle" with all the Republicans on the other. I had forgotten that. He said it was a small thing but an important thing that helped the members get to know each other and see each other as people, even if they disagreed on policy. He said there were Democrats he voted with every day who "I wouldn't have over to my house for dinner" and Republicans with whom he never voted but whom he was happy to hang out with.

Sandwiched between the speeches was an interesting morning panel on the role of the media. The consensus was that the media tend to contribution to political polarization by emphasizing conflict, giving good play to name-calling and failing, often, to explain the ideological or practical stakes over which people might be fighting and using shorthand instead that tends to portray every dispute as bickering.

The one big dissenter was Lawrence O'Donnell, who appears regularly on MSNBC with Keith Olberman. O'Donnell had an interesting take. He said we should ignore the shouting and the name-calling on cable television chat shows because "no one is watching." He said all of those shows get such low ratings that they are irrelevant in our political discourse.

Matt Dowd, who was chief strategist for both the Bush and Schwarzenegger re-election campaigns, disagreed. He said even if very few people are watching, every political office in Washington and many in the heartland are tuned into those shows, and they inform the opinion leaders who then inform the rest of us. I think Dowd has a point. The same thing, after all, has long been said about newspapers, that very few voters get their news from print. But television reporters get their news from print, and bloggers get their news from print, and talk radio gets its news from print. And then they all go out and amplify what they read. So you can't measure the influence of either medium simply by looking at the number of viewers or readers.

Posted by dweintraub on June 19, 2007 1:35 PM