OK, one more thing about Wednesday night’s Democratic debate and then I’ll let it go. Determining which of the discussion topics was the most inane is tricky, but I’d have to go with the flag lapel-pin question.
Early on in the debate, Charlie Gibson said he wanted to offer a question that “goes to the basic issue of electability.” Gibson said, “[I]t is a question raised by a voter in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a woman by the name of Nash McCabe.” From videotape, McCabe then asked Obama if he “believe[s] in” the American flag, and why he doesn’t “wear the flag.”
For ABC, this offers a little distance from the trivia — the moderators didn’t ask about lapel pins, some regular ol’ person did. I had assumed that ABC went around western Pennsylvania, looking for voters with good questions, and thought McCabe’s was provocative. But that’s not quite what happened.
A couple of weeks ago, McCabe told the New York Times that she can’t back Obama. “How can I vote for a president who won’t wear a flag pin?” the recently unemployed clerk typist said. (Josh Marshall explained, “Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let’s send a camera crew and film her slamming Obama to his face. It’ll be great in the debate.”)
Or as Will Bunch put it:
So Nash McCabe wasn’t located at random at all. Instead, someone at ABC News decided that they wanted to go after Obama on the patriotism issue, and they actively sought a Pennsylvanian who they knew wanted to bring it up. I assume they thought it would sound better if “a typical voter” asked the question instead of Charlie Gibson. “You see, we’re only raising the issue the voters really care about,” they can claim.
Yes, but the claim isn’t true.
McClatchy also took a closer look at McCabe’s circumstances and found a very sad story.
But to understand why Obama rubs McCabe wrong is to go beyond the question of what a flag pin has to do with patriotism — it’s not really about the flag pin, she said in a telephone interview Thursday — and consider McCabe’s life. It’s no Hawaiian prep school and Ivy League story, unlike Obama’s. It’s a slice of working-class Pennsylvania, the core of Hillary Clinton’s support there.
McCabe met her husband, Lloyd, in April 1983 at a dance. They married two months later. Six months after that, she says, he was injured in a coal mine accident. He hasn’t worked since.
They never had children. He had back surgery. The muscle relaxers he took damaged his heart. He’s had three bypasses, nine angioplasties, seven stents and a pacemaker. Three months ago doctors found a brain tumor. His choice: surgery that he may or may not survive, or life in a wheelchair.
Over 25 years of marriage, McCabe was the breadwinner. She said it took eight years to get her husband disability payments, during which time they racked up huge bills.
“I was a nurse’s aide, a cashier,” McCabe said. “From 1996 to 2000, I was a manager of a cleaning company. I started out as secretary and worked my way up to manager, and then the company decided to close. It took me almost two-and-a-half years to find a job that I got laid off from recently” as a clerk-typist. She has a high school diploma.
Ironically, she sounds like one of the frustrated small-town voters Obama has been reaching out to for quite a while.
Perhaps if ABC News had focused a little more on McCabe’s economic circumstances, and a little less on her flag-pin interest, we may have been able to learn something useful in the debate.
It’s worth noting that the original NYT article that quoted McCabe and made her interesting to reporters wasn’t about questioned patriotism; it was about racial attitudes in western Pennsylvania. It led Bunch to conclude:
So, the New York Times is basically stating that many voters are finding odd or vague reasons not to support a candidate who president who happens to be black. And without any thought to the subtext, ABC News plucked one of those reasons and brought it to the center stage of democracy.
To be extra clear, none of this is a criticism of Nash McCabe — my heart goes out to her and her husband, and there is no evidence here that her views on Obama and the flag, which I personally think are misguided, are racially motivated.
Instead, it is yet another indictment of ABC News, which was eager to act is if there’s no racial subtext to this election, other than its question about affirmative action for Obama’s “affluent African-American daughters.” Obama’s been under fire for the last week for suggesting that Rust Belt voters — facing a swirl of feelings about the economy and “people who don’t look like them” — are wooed by wedge issues.
ABC’s contribution to that discussion: Wooing voters with wedge issues.
