Country Wisdom: White House vs. Fox

Campaign attacks on Barack Obama and his crew as latte-drinking elitists are finally coming into play in their war of words with Rupert Murdoch's rough-and-ready outback minions.

Any country boy could have told them a basic rule of rural life: Never get into a pissing contest with a skunk.

Now, the Administration is finding itself befouled by controversy as an ABC correspondent asks at a briefing why "one of our sister organizations" was excluded from a round of official interviews and a moderate House Democrat calls the feud "a mistake...beneath the White House to get into a tit for tat with news organizations.”

The President himself, after pointedly meeting with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and other sympathetic souls, goes public on NBC. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he observes. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”

Historically, that's a distinction the American people have always reserved the right to make for themselves. Back in the late 1960s, Richard Nixon unleashed his Vice President Spiro Agnew to attack the unfriendly media.

Agnew, who later resigned in disgrace for taking bribes, pelted them with alliterative epithets--"pusillanimous pussyfooters," "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals," phrases coined by the recently deceased William Safire who later morphed into a respected New York Times columnist and Pat Buchanan, who is still pontificating for MSNBC.

Those attacks brought a backlash. Although I spent an evening with Mike Wallace and other journalists privately questioning our own fairness, the White House intrusion into that debate only brought public disapproval and recruited more media members for what Nixon would call his Enemies List.

The lesson here for the Obama people seems simple enough: Call out Fox's commentators for their lies and distortion, but don't try to neuter the network as a news organization. In city or country contests, that's not a winning strategy.

Palin's Pluses

As new polling shows her costing him more votes than she might win, John McCain's running mate is, in her own way, doing a number of services for the Republican Party and the nation as a whole.

For one, Sarah Palin is proving that gender doesn't count in bringing ignorance (pace Dan Quayle) and mean-spiritedness (shades of Spiro Agnew) to a national ticket as she promises a balanced budget after four years of a McCain Administration and keeps repeating blatant lies about Barack Obama's tax proposals. Feminists can rest easy now that she and Hillary Clinton have shown women to be the equals of men in both venality and statesmanship.

Perhaps even more valuable is Palin's demonstration, by her meteoric rise and downfall, that media exposure cuts both ways in politics as well as show business (i.e., Britney Spears and Paris Hilton). Her handlers have learned that in presidential politics, as Muhammad Ali said about the prize ring, you can run but you can't hide.

Palin's most important contribution may be yet to come. When the extremists who finessed McCain into choosing her for VP start pushing Palin for the top spot in 2012, traditional Republican may finally rise up and take back their party and restore responsible two-party politics to the national dialogue.

If and when that happens, Palin can go back to governing Alaska with a sense of accomplishment and a nifty new wardrobe.

Oprah, Palin, Drudge and Agnew

In her convention speech, Sarah Palin bashed the media with "a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion." Her defiance harked back to another GOP VP, Spiro Agnew, who assailed the "nattering nabobs of negativism" before being forced to resign for taking bundles of cash when he was a governor.

Palin is, among other things, the Agnew of a McCain campaign as eager to blame the media for its problems as the Nixon Administration was back then, and now good old reliable Matt Drudge has started the ball rolling with an assault on Oprah for not inviting Palin to appear on her show.

"Oprah's staff is sharply divided on the merits of booking Sarah Palin," the Drudge Report quotes its usual anonymous sources as confiding. "One executive close to Winfrey is warning any Palin ban could ignite a dramatic backlash!"

Never mind that Oprah denies any such discussions, confirms that she will not interview any of the candidates and expresses interest in having Palin on after the elections. That hasn't deterred her competition such as ABC from picking up and running with the story by asking, "Is Oprah Biased?"

In stirring this first little media tempest in a teapot, McCain backers get a twofer--discrediting Oprah for backing Obama and painting Palin as a victim of gender bias. If they had picked Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, would anybody be badgering Oprah?

The next stage, which has already started, will be a sustained attack on journalists for investigating Palin's background and beliefs and questioning her claims such as selling the state jet on eBay or rejecting federal funds for the Bridge to Nowhere.

Somewhere in political rogue purgatory, Spiro Agnew must be smiling.

Nixon Nostalgia

Dick Cavett, the best celebrity interviewer of the 1970s, just can’t let go of Richard Nixon. On his wonderful New York Times blog, the last three entries have been about the Great Unindicted Co-Conspirator. I know just how he feels.

Cavett's current post recalls seeing Himself in the flesh at a restaurant with his daughter Julie during the Ford Administration.

“I grabbed up two menus,” Cavett writes. “Approaching the famous seated pair from behind, I piped, 'Our specials today include the Yorba Linda soufflé, the Whittier College clam chowder . . .' I invented a few more fictional Nixon-related specials; you get the idea. At least I self-censored any Checkers or Watergate references.”

Nixon was not amused. Nor was he much taken with a Cavett anecdote about the smell of burning paper at a White House dinner interpreted as the infamous Veep Spiro Agnew being in the library.

“Oh, I see,” Nixon finally said with a straight face. “Book burning.”

Years from now, will a retired Jon Stewart be writing on his blog about George Bush not being amused by Dick Cheney jokes?