With all due respect to Nancy Reagan, her proposal that the first Republican debate of the 2012 season be held at the Reagan Library in the spring of 2011 is worse than a nonstarter. The country needs to focus on the hugely important congressional debates this spring, not on made-for-MSM, liberal-dominated GOP wrestling matches.
The idea is itself an insult to conservative activists and new media. A quick rejection by GOP candidates of the presumptuous declaration of inevitability by Politico.com and NBC that they would be in charge would go a long way toward recognizing that these outlets, like most of the Beltway-Manhattan media elite, went in the tank for President Obama in 2008 and won’t be allowed to dictate the terms of the 2012 presidential race.
Full disclosure: In addition to my radio show, I write for The Examiner and Townhall.com. I used to receive an occasional invitation to write for Politico or to appear on MSNBC, but as those outlets have gone left — slowly, in the case of Politico, or rapidly and without reservation for NBC and its Olbermann subsidiary — those invites have stopped. That’s fine. I still enjoy having Politico’s Mike Allen on my show as a regular guest most Tuesdays, and I read Politico every day.
But both outlets are significantly biased to the left, and not just to the president, but to the whole Beltway culture which is inherently big-government oriented and dominated by the conventional big-government wisdom about every debate. Very few Beltway media voices retain any connection to the conservative grass roots or the GOP’s base, and those that do don’t work at Politico or NBC.
In fact, those journalists never appear at these debates, which are instead given over to lefties like the affable Anderson Cooper, the professional but still MSM-driven Wolf Blitzer, the amiable Brian Williams or the talented-but-still-Beltway-driven John Harris or Jim Lehrer.
Can we be honest? They are all liberals. All of them. Not one of the questioners that could or would be proposed by Politico or NBC would be remotely in touch with the cares, concerns, and passions of the GOP’s primary electorate. The process of choosing a GOP nominee should not be mediated by the left-wing media — again.
I discussed this topic with one of my favorite Beltway pundits, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, on Friday’s radio show. Cillizza gamely defended his guild, but here’s the key exchange:
HH: OK, objectively, what would get more ratings and be more interesting, a panel of Brian Williams and John Harris and Anderson Cooper asking eight Republicans questions, or a panel of Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved — four different radio networks — asking the same people questions? What would be more interesting, Chris?
CC: And I don’t want to sit on the fence, but I think, I mean, I think there would be two different sets of questions, potentially.
HH: Oh, hugely.
CC: But I don’t know that either of them would be uninteresting.
Beltway liberals asking MSM questions would indeed be different than opinion journalists of the center-right, and I suspect far less intelligent and challenging as the questions posed by my panel, which would probe things like the constitutionality of the individual mandate while avoiding questions from plants in the audience, Santa Claus, and the endless abortion questions which marked 2008’s “debates” and which the liberal MSM “journalists” manufactures to advance the left’s agenda on a four-year interval.
There are scores of conservative journalists to people the panels and center-right outlets to sponsor GOP debates when they begin, which hopefully will not be until the fall of 2011.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
