{"id":16466,"date":"2008-08-04T08:05:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T12:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/16432.html"},"modified":"2008-08-04T08:05:01","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T12:05:01","slug":"gergen-identifies-code-for-hes-uppity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/gergen-identifies-code-for-hes-uppity\/","title":{"rendered":"Gergen identifies code for ‘uppity’"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to identifying loaded campaign rhetoric, David Gergen probably isn’t the first media figure that comes to mind. He’s a Republican, and has been a member in a good standing of the DC political establishment for quite a while.<\/p>\n

And yet, when he sees Republican “code”-attacks, Gergen isn’t afraid to call them out, as he did yesterday on ABC.<\/p>\n

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As Sam Stein reported<\/a>, Gergen told his roundtable colleagues, “There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, ‘he’s not one of us.’ I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it’s the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, ‘The One,’ that’s code for, ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas,’ we get what that’s about.”<\/p>\n

I honestly didn’t expect Gergen to be the one to take McCain to task for this, but I’m pleasantly surprised that he did.<\/p>\n

It’s also worth considering whether Gergen’s take might ultimately shape the media’s perspective on this. Gergen is one of those guys — similar to the WaPo’s David Broder — who not only helps reflect the DC conventional wisdom, but who actually helps shape<\/i> the DC conventional wisdom. And if he’s out there telling a national television audience, in effect, “Look, McCain’s playing a racial game here,” one wonders whether other media figures will soon pick up on the same point.
\n
\nWhat else did we learn on the Sunday shows?<\/p>\n

We learned that Joe Lieberman is probably going to speak at the Republican National Convention<\/a>. He told Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press”:<\/p>\n

“If Sen. McCain feels that I can help his candidacy\u2026I will do it. But I assure you this Tom, I\u2019m not going to go to that convention \u2014 the Republican convention \u2014 and spend my time attacking Barack Obama. I\u2019m going to go there really talking about why I support John McCain and why I hope a lot of other independents and Democrats will do that.<\/p>\n

“And frankly, I\u2019m going to go to a partisan convention and tell them \u2014 if I go \u2014 why it\u2019s so important that we start to act like Americans and not as partisan mud-slingers.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We learned that Mike Murphy isn’t impressed<\/a> with his old boss’ message.<\/p>\n

At the same time Gergen was calling out the Arizona Republican on ABC’s This Week, Mike Murphy, McCain’s campaign manager during the 2000 Republican primary, was describing the Senator’s recent spot comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as “clumsy, juvenile, and a mistake.”<\/p>\n

“I think it was a dumb ad,” said Murphy, during an appearance on Meet The Press. “Not because it asked the question, ‘is Barack Obama ready for the job?’ That’s a very legitimate criticism, and I think Barack Obama made it a little bit worse by his stumbling response later. The problem is that McCain — McCain’s strategy has to hinge, in my view, on one thing: how does a Republican survive in October and November a huge anti-Republican vote? Luckily for the party, McCain is a different kind of Republican. So everything in the campaign ought to build toward that case. And when if you get off into the small juvenile stuff about Britney Spears, I think you distract from that.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We learned, unfortunately, that John Kerry doesn’t think much of Wesley Clark’s criticism<\/a> of McCain.<\/p>\n

And we learned that Lieberman is not only willing to repeat the word “celebrity” over and over again, but he’s also willing to play the age card<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to identifying loaded campaign rhetoric, David Gergen probably isn’t the first media figure that comes to mind. He’s a Republican, and has been a member in a good standing of the DC political establishment for quite a while. And yet, when he sees Republican “code”-attacks, Gergen isn’t afraid to call them out, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}