The Permanent Campaign

Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down, investigated the strange coincidence of all the TV networks having Sonya Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” speech cued up the instant her nomination was announced, finding that:

The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance. (Emphasis mine)

Bowden focuses on the rise of web-based partisan journalism and the MSM’s new habit of stovepiping propaganda, but what I find interesting is his identification of the 24-7 news cycle as “post journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle.” He’s talking about the permanent campaign:

Who created this state of affairs? Risking Bowden’s wrath for taking a partisan position, I have to say that after studying American politics for a quarter-century it’s clearly the doing of Culture Warriors. The reactionary right has been making this happen since 1973 through direct mail, talk radio, and the evangelist-political complex. Scrutinizing every detail of every politician they disagree with, a vast field of right-wing propaganda has radicalized the conservative movement and made American politics toxic to democracy. In the age of the blog, that propaganda machine has been de-professionalized by the Michelle Malkins of the world — who have, if anything, heated up the rhetoric.

It’s only in the age of the internet that we’ve seen anything like that from the left. Bowden’s article comes just as a right-wing meme emerges about Obama as the “perpetual candidate” — which is ironic, since only a community-organizer-in-chief could possibly counter the perpetual smear machine of the right. We’re seeing that right now with health care and the public option; we’ve had a farcical object-lesson in Obama’s back-to-school speech. He is the candidate the right created.

They made it this way, and want to complain about the way things are.