A year after the Sandy Hook massacre, Eric Boehlert has something to say. I generally dislike arguments that blame the media for public opinion, but there is something to Boehlert’s argument.
The gun bill’s failure in April didn’t spark much anger or indignation in the press. It didn’t unleash a wave of commentary taking Republicans to task for their refusal to participate in governance and problem solving. What it did produce was endless commentary about how the gun vote was nearly entirely Obama’s fault; how Democrats got “cocky” and tried to do too much, and instead missed “their window” of opportunity and were left “grasping at straws.” (How the vote was now “shadowing the president.”) The press pushed its preferred storyline that the gun loss confirmed Obama doesn’t know how to use the levers of power inside Washington and remains hopelessly incapable of working across the [a]isle with honest brokers in the GOP.
In the end, the background check failure was portrayed as a process story, and a process story that featured Obama as the big loser. In other words, nine out of ten Republican senators refused to support a scaled-down gun bill that nine out of ten Americans supported, but it was Obama who got targeted with the failure.
And that’s why the gun vote became something of a turning point for the news media this year. Because if the press could look at the GOP’s obstruction of the gun bill and its refusal to let a working majority in both chambers pass common sense legislation in the wake of a national tragedy, a gun bill that enjoyed overwhelming support among Republicans and gun owners, if media elites could witness that kind of intransigence and come away blaming Obama and giving the GOP a pass, than there was no type of radical Republican behavior the press wouldn’t excuse or water down.
And in 2013, there wasn’t.
A couple of things on this.
First, the Republicans did eventually go too far in 2013. The press was not kind to them during the government shutdown.
Second, this tendency to treat the president as somehow flawed in his leadership qualities because he can’t convince Republicans to help him enact his agenda is natural. We are conditioned to see the president (any president) as much more powerful than he really is. We judge them by whether or not they can get things done. If they can’t, they must be weak.
But the gun debate showed the limits of power when dealing with lunatics. The president might be able to use the bully pulpit to move public opinion, but he can’t force a Republican to vote with him if the Republican doesn’t care about defying 90% of the people.
When future historians try to understand the Obama administration, they will have to try to understand why the Republicans felt so immune from popular opinion.
The answer is not really related to the media. It’s related to gerrymandered districts and the threat of primaries. Some of the Republicans who would have felt a political need to work with Obama were already gone, changed parties, or retired during the president’s first term. I’m thinking of people like Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. I’m thinking of Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe. What was left were senators like Mark Kirk of Illinois, who seems at least as concerned with winning a primary challenge as he is about winning a general election, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who was actually willing to help the president pass a background check bill but found no company.
The gun debate was only the most stark example of how the Republicans went insane and no longer cared about anything but covering their right flank. It might have been avoided if the GOP leadership hadn’t decided to adopt a strategy of total obstruction before the president had even been sworn in, but they demonized the president to such a degree that they couldn’t work him without looking like traitors to the only voters who mattered to them.