Walter Shapiro explains how we’re supposed to pick our presidents:
This is how presidential vetting traditionally works. The press pack pounces on the logical fallacies in a candidate’s positions and the shakiness of his resume. Party elites and top fundraisers then decide, if they have not already, that any candidate subjected to this kind of non-ideological media assault is unelectable. And eventually voters—especially when the calendar moves beyond activist-dominated Iowa—get the message that they are trying to elect a president and not merely thumbing their noses at the establishment.
That pretty well explains what happened to Howard Dean, although I don’t think he committed too many logical fallacies. It’s also interesting to see why Shapiro fears that the vetting process won’t work this time and the Republicans might actually nominate a doofus like Herman Cain.
Aiding Cain—and potentially defying past election cycles—is the fact that Republican voters are highly skeptical of the media: 72 percent of conservative Republicans and 62 percent of all Republicans believe that there is “a lot” of bias in news coverage, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center.
In other words, our Establishment Media has little influence over what’s left of the Republican Party. The more they diss a Sarah Palin or a Herman Cain, the more popular those candidates become. At least, that’s the theory. In truth, people came to hate Sarah Palin with a white-hot passion. But the media probably kept her popular for longer than she deserved.
I’m ambivalent about Shapiro’s worldview. I think the media does effectively vet the candidates, weeding out the lunatics. And that serves a needed function, I guess. But the media does this very, very inefficiently and it tends to obsess about superficial stuff like whether a candidate connects with the people. Too often, the media tries to weed out candidates because they have some unorthodox view rather than that they’re totally unprepared to be president. And the media is actually terrible about vetting the actual nominees. They are too afraid of being biased to fairly arbitrate who is telling the truth.
