Halperin: Stupidity or Worse?
If you haven’t already seen it, watch this unbelievable bit of “analysis” from Mark Halperin on ABC’s This Week:
For those of you who can’t watch youtube clips, Halperin is asked for his opinion on McCain’s now infamous house gaffe, and this exchange follows:
Indeed, the notion that mocking McCain for committing an obvious gaffe somehow “opens the door” to a series of totally unrelated guilt-by-association attacks is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. If the Obama campaign had launched a slanderous swift-boat style attack against McCain, then maybe you could argue that it “opened the door” to a kitchen sink style counter attack. But all that happened here was McCain committed an unforced error and received some well-deserved, light-hearted mockery for it. Halperin's point seems to be that mocking McCain in any way gives the McCain campaign the green light to throw every smear they can think of back at Obama. In other words, the Democrats are going to rue the day that they dared to make fun of John McCain; they should have just kept quite and not drawn any attention to the Gaffe of the Century.
Halperin’s “analysis” here is so ridiculous, so transparently absurd, that even McCain’s own staff would be embarrassed to say it on the record. In fact, it’s so dumb that I fear there may be more than just stupidity at work here. Halperin has been working his GOP sources like crazy over the last week; he desperately wants to be the one who breaks the news of McCain’s VP selection. In fact, he reported on Friday—citing two well-placed GOP sources—that McCain had selected Mitt Romney as his running mate (that post is apparently gone now, but Hot Air captured a screenshot). I hate to say this, but when you have someone who is desperately courting various sources in the McCain campaign, and you see him at the same time parroting absurd McCain campaign talking points on a major network news program, you have to ask yourself whether that person might be sucking up to the McCain campaign in exchange for access.
You have to ask yourself why these GOP sources would give such a big scoop to Halperin of all people. I’m not saying there was necessarily any explicit quid pro quo—i.e., we’ll give you the scoop if you go to bat for us on Sunday—but you can imagine a number of ways in which the desire for access can corrupt your ability to be an impartial analyst. Maybe Halperin was grateful for the scoop he got on Friday and felt the need to return the favor. Maybe he was trying to ingratiate himself with his GOP sources in the hopes of being the first to report—with certainty—who John McCain’s running mate will be.
I don’t pretend to know what’s going on in Mark Halperin’s head. But something is definitely not right. He’s either an incredibly stupid person, or he’s shilling for the McCain campaign in exchange for access. It’s one or the other, and neither TIME nor ABC News should put up with it either way.
For those of you who can’t watch youtube clips, Halperin is asked for his opinion on McCain’s now infamous house gaffe, and this exchange follows:
Mark Halperin: My hunch is that this is going to be one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates--but it’s Barack Obama.Josh Marshall sums it up well: “It's a very tough standard, but I think this may be the stupidest thing Halperin has ever said.”
George Stephanopoulos: Why?
Mark Halperin: I believe this has opened the door to not only Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers. I think that the Obama campaign aggressively jumped on…
George Stephanopoulos: don’t you think that was going to come up anyway?
Mark Halperin: It opened… I think it would have been hard for John McCain given the way he says he was going to run the campaign to do all this stuff without the door being opened.
Indeed, the notion that mocking McCain for committing an obvious gaffe somehow “opens the door” to a series of totally unrelated guilt-by-association attacks is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. If the Obama campaign had launched a slanderous swift-boat style attack against McCain, then maybe you could argue that it “opened the door” to a kitchen sink style counter attack. But all that happened here was McCain committed an unforced error and received some well-deserved, light-hearted mockery for it. Halperin's point seems to be that mocking McCain in any way gives the McCain campaign the green light to throw every smear they can think of back at Obama. In other words, the Democrats are going to rue the day that they dared to make fun of John McCain; they should have just kept quite and not drawn any attention to the Gaffe of the Century.
Halperin’s “analysis” here is so ridiculous, so transparently absurd, that even McCain’s own staff would be embarrassed to say it on the record. In fact, it’s so dumb that I fear there may be more than just stupidity at work here. Halperin has been working his GOP sources like crazy over the last week; he desperately wants to be the one who breaks the news of McCain’s VP selection. In fact, he reported on Friday—citing two well-placed GOP sources—that McCain had selected Mitt Romney as his running mate (that post is apparently gone now, but Hot Air captured a screenshot). I hate to say this, but when you have someone who is desperately courting various sources in the McCain campaign, and you see him at the same time parroting absurd McCain campaign talking points on a major network news program, you have to ask yourself whether that person might be sucking up to the McCain campaign in exchange for access.
You have to ask yourself why these GOP sources would give such a big scoop to Halperin of all people. I’m not saying there was necessarily any explicit quid pro quo—i.e., we’ll give you the scoop if you go to bat for us on Sunday—but you can imagine a number of ways in which the desire for access can corrupt your ability to be an impartial analyst. Maybe Halperin was grateful for the scoop he got on Friday and felt the need to return the favor. Maybe he was trying to ingratiate himself with his GOP sources in the hopes of being the first to report—with certainty—who John McCain’s running mate will be.
I don’t pretend to know what’s going on in Mark Halperin’s head. But something is definitely not right. He’s either an incredibly stupid person, or he’s shilling for the McCain campaign in exchange for access. It’s one or the other, and neither TIME nor ABC News should put up with it either way.
posted by A.L. at 9:51 PM
4 Comments:
Halperin’s “analysis” here is so ridiculous, so transparently absurd, that even McCain’s own staff would be embarrassed to say it on the record.
What campaign have you been watching? I really don't think there's any argument so ridiculous that a McCain adviser can't say it with a straight face. One of them already made this exact argument on a conference call on Thursday or Friday.
Fire Halperin!
Seriously, AL, you need to calm down and try to apply some of the analytical skills they taught you in law school.
First of all, Halperin is simply expressing an opinion here. Even if that opinion is as stupid as you say (which, as I will explain in a moment, it is not), who the heck cares? These talking heads are constantly giving opinions, often silly, self-contradictory or totally meaningless. As far as I am concerned, they are just filling up air time.
Second, what exactly is the opinion Halperin is expressing? At one level, he is simply saying that the McCain campaign will use Obama’s “ 7 houses” attack as a reason to bring up issues regarding Obama, including the Rezko matter. You can’t object to that because we know it is true. The McCain campaign has already made a responsive ad that talks about Rezko.
You might object to Halperin’s point on the theory (which I think you expressed in an earlier post) that McCain would have brought up Rezko eventually anyway. But even if that is true (and there is no way of telling whether it is), you have to admit that the “7 houses” issue has made it easier to do so now.
At another level, Halperin is expressing a value judgment that Obama has “opened the door” to these counterattacks. Of course, we are not in court, and there is no accepted standard for what constitutes “opening the door.” McCain can simply argue that Obama made a negative attack on him, and he is responding with a negative attack on Obama. Obama will similarly justify his negative attack on McCain by the fact that McCain called him a celebrity. And so it goes.
But if we were to attempt to agree on a standard as to what constitutes “opening the door,” I would argue that the Rezko matter falls comfortably within that standard (I would not say that about other matters, like Jeremiah Wright). If Obama is going to claim that the fact that McCain owns a bunch of houses says something about McCain’s character and his fitness to be president, how can it possibly be unfair for McCain to bring up serious ethical questions about how Obama acquired his house?
You can’t be serious about your suggestion that Obama is merely engaging in some “light-hearted mockery” of McCain. He using this gaffe to make a serious and sustained attempt to define McCain as someone unable to understand or care about the problems of ordinary Americans. It is certainly more negative and less light-hearted than McCain’s attempt to paint Obama as a celebrity, which seemed to make you hyperventilate.
Nor can you make the case that the Rezko matter is just a made up issue, like Obama being a Muslim. Without going into the details of the Rezko relationship, which are rather interesting, suffice to say that Obama himself has acknowledged that the house deal was a “bone-headed move” precisely because it created an appearance of impropriety. You may take it as an article of faith that there is no substance underlying that appearance, but it is unreasonable to expect the McCain campaign to view it the same way.
Finally, Halperin’s opinion may be taken as a prediction about how the media and the public will ultimately react to the charge and countercharges here. In the short-term, it seems to me that he is correct at least with regard to the fact that the media seems to have accepted the introduction of the Rezko issue without much hand-wringing. In the longer term, I suspect that the spectacle of Obama’s personally mocking McCain will not be helpful to Obama, even apart from issues like Rezko. But that is just a guess on my part. Whether ultimately Obama or McCain will end up worse off as a result of these exchanges is anyone’s guess. So if you want to be outraged by Halperin making his own guess and dressing it up as informed opinion, go ahead. But you will have to be equally outraged at every other talking head who talks about this election.
MLS,
Perhaps I should have been clearer in the post, but I think there's a HUGE difference between Rezko on the one hand and Ayers/Wright on the other. I fully expected that the McCain camp would fire back with Rezko, given his at least superficial connection with the issue of housing. The idea, though, that mocking McCain's for his house gaffe "opens the door" to Ayers and Wright is ridiculous. As is the idea that McCain would not have rolled out those attack if Obama had just played nice and not made fun of him.
right,
the stupidity consists in the idea that McCain and his republican surrogates would have played nice under any circumstance.
The stupidity, I would add, also consists in the idea that Obama will REGRET having "opened the door" to the smears. Fact is, a lot of this (Ayers, Wright, Rezko)is now trodden territory, for a fair % of the country, and for all political reporters. Ayers/Wright/Rezko is frankly not that impressive a list of dirty laundry, and it's pretty easily washed. Ayers: I was eight. Wright: I renounced. Rezko: nothin' there. That's why the Right defaulted so quickly to pure subjective nonsense (that Obama is a celebrity) and to outright fictions (that Obama is not a citizen).
Taken together, the Ayers/Wright/Rezko smears might work (as Whitewater did) if they actually resonated with something in Obama's character - that is, if there really was something kind of spooky and dangerous about Obama - but the whole country is about to find out, there isn't.
However, as MLS points out, these are all admittedly arguable assertions, but I think A.L.'s larger point is not the stupidity. It's the apparent transparency of a reporter saying what one side, to whom he is presently looking for a scoop, would want him to say.
And the apparent transparency of a reporter who has consistently said everything within his power to assure his viewers/readers that this is going to be a close one, and that you should therefore tune in to him every day between now and first week of November - because he knows what he's talking about, and he says weird shit that makes people angry.
In that respect, not stupid at all. Just kind of disgusting.
...which having said, morally obliges me, at the risk of sounding like a name-dropper, to acknowledge that I did room with Mark in college way back when. I have never in all my life met anyone who is safer or more secure in his own moral universe, and on that account can assure you that he would contend that he is being willfuly misunderstood by anyone calling his assertion either corrupt or stupid, except for the part about the Obama's camp's REGRETTING having opened the door, which he would acknoweldge is a judgement call, to be borne out in time as either having been prescient or not.
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