Posted by
Rob on Friday, January 02, 2009 7:07:42 PM
A lot of people, myself included, thought that the American public could not be bought. No matter how much glitzy advertising and bumper stickers, your average American could tell the difference between experience and inexperience, between age and youth, between Christianity and cult, between innocence and corruption, between veteran and greenhorn, between Annapolis and Harvard, between reality and hallucination.
We were wrong. We could be bought.
My small consolation comes from considering the price of our apostasy. But it is a small consolation, for like virginity, the next candidate will have the presidency for a song. Nevertheless, it is important to tally up the numbers, lest we believe the lie that this deviation is "the will of the people". For as Plato warned us many ages ago, a Democracy is only as safe as the purity of its people, the morality of the nation. As soon as the unwashed masses begin to sell their birthright, then democracy rapidly devolves into a warring oligarchy and from thence to monarchy just as surely as Rome evolved from Republic to Empire. We are watching the decline of government of the people, by the people and for the people. We live in the twilight of the gods, among the last presidents of this nation, in a world bent on destroying the American experiment.
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard (!) political scientist who almost alone in 1990 predicted the coming Islamic worldwide jihad in his book
Clash of Civilizations, died last week, but not before publishing
his last book in 2004 on the fate of America. The WSJ carried a
fitting review of the man and his books (as well as
National Review). His point is that there are three possible choices for America: to become the Bush / Wolfowitz / Cheney transformer of the world; to become transformed by the world into the likeness of the transnational, Davos, UN loving NGO; or to remain American--suspicious of empires and emperors alike. Under President Bush, we had the first, under President Obama the second, but what will become of the19th century isolationist America that Lincoln talked about?
Perhaps even in Lincoln's day it was always a Platonic ideal: perfect in the abstract, impossible in the practice. Certainly Teddy Rooseveldt dominated the Americas with his little empire. Wilson took it over the ocean, and made the first attempt at a world HQ with the League of Nations. FDR first instituted his version of it at home before exporting it to Europe and Japan. America's isolationism has always been a temporary shyness, almost feigned attitude, easily swayed by a Lusitania, a Pearl Harbor, a Gulf of Tonkin, a Twin Towers. Huntington always distrusted such false foreign lovers, as can be seen in the fate of those recent presidents that followed the siren call to conflict: Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq. So the question arises, "if these extra-territorial actions are so politically lethal, why are so many presidents willing to go? Who are these sirens, and what makes their song so attractive?"
And that is the thesis of this post. The sirens are those that Huntington identifies: the transnationalists that so powerfully occupy the educational, journalistic, and political sectors of Western society. It does no good to try and identify a conspiracy because their actions are so blatant, their message so pervasive, their collaboration so intentional that it is more like an invasion than a conspiracy. We are being given an option between the past that fashioned America, and the future that tantalizingly whispers about forbidden cities and exotic fruits.
Of the media outlets, television was the first to insinuate its morality and violence and distorted history into the living room, so we threw out the TV with the birth of our first child. Then as our kids grew older, we realized how insidious the schooling was that first destroyed their love of learning, and then replaced it with sociological indoctrination, so we began to homeschool. In elementary school, we saw how watered down the math curricula had become and bought exclusively Saxon math books. And after the kids got to junior high, we realized how distorted the history books had become, and insisted either on primary sources, or textbooks written before 1950. When the kids got to high school, we realized how empty of content the geography/social studies were, and insisted on macro-economics and large doses of Friedrick Hayek. (Or to be more truthful, I realized how little I knew on the subject, and wanted to understand why the Carter administration of Keynesian economics had failed so utterly, and the Reagan revolution had succeeded.) And during this time period, the bias on radio news was getting so bad, I not only swore never to listen to NPR again, but also CBS and most syndicated news. The same thing happened with the newspapers, when it published an article blaming the Pope for AIDS and I found out my little local paper was a subsidiary of the garangutan New York Times. Fortunately, the internet began to burgeon at this time, and I began to get my news exclusively from the internet. (For three years, I was the only one optimistic about the war in Iraq, a propaganda victory now being billed as a miracle.)
For as I educated the children and myself, the stark contrast between what was taught in the schools, played on the TV, or crooned on the Senate floor and the facts I was learning from history, from science, from economics made me realize just how high the stakes had become. It was no longer differences of opinion that separated Americans, but differences of history, differences of math, differences of science, differences of economics. Either one lived in a fuzzy post-modern world where opinion and fact were interchangeable, or one lived in a world with real history and real heroes. Democracy can handle differences of opinion, it cannot handle differences of worldview. And as our Congress became a war zone over worldviews, it became increasingly dysfunctional and irrelevant.
But in a Post-Modern world, something has to sway the public to lean one direction or another. Somebody has to make a persuasive argument. How can that be done if logic and facts mean nothing?
Easily. With money.
The
Federal Election Commission has documented the cost of this most expensive presidential campaign in history, both in absolute and relative terms (1996=$448.9M, 2000=$649.5M, 2004=$1.01bn) Never before has so much been spent on so little. Here is the breakdown:
So right away, we can see that not only did Democrats dominate the funding by a 2:1 margin, but Obama raised more money than all the Republican candidates put together, outspending McCain by more than 2:1.
But can a even a 2:1 ratio make such a difference? Would you sell your grandmother on the strength of that ratio? Even accounting for the weak morality of America, somehow this wouldn't explain it alone.
That's because the real number is closer to 100:1.
As many have noted, the mainstream press, the newspapers, the radio news, the TV news, the TV soaps, the TV comedies, the check-out tabloids, were all sold out for Obama. Having been educated on the Iraq war, it didn't surprise me that so much bias was blatantly displayed, but what surprised me was the complete shutdown of opposing views. If you wanted to know the real polling results, you couldn't rely on what the newspapers published. If you wanted the text of a speech by McCain or Palin, you had to download it yourself. All that free advertising is of almost inestimable value. The NYT may charge $128,000 for a full page ad, but you can't run an ad on the front page above the fold for any amount of money. But day after day, week after week, the NYT did exactly that. And not only the NYT, but the Washington Post, the LATimes, the Chicago Trib, the Miami Herald, and every mainstream newspaper in America. And not only did they publish propaganda for their candidate, but smeared McCain and especially Palin. One can't even run smear campaigns effectively today, without falling afoul of lawyers and bad press, but the press can, and can get away with it.
But for all the cost of getting favorable newspaper coverage, even more expensive are TV ads--one minute superbowl ads are notorious for costing millions. Yet in interview after interview, in long half-hour blocks and 5 minutes spreads on evening news, Obama was treated with softball questions and outright adoration ("a tingle up my leg"), whereas McCain and Palin were trashed mercilessly. (Evidently it is a habit hard to break, for even this week AP news carried
this announcement of the birth of Palin's grandson, "The teenage daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose quest for the
vice presidency began to go downhill the day she announced the
pregnancy, has given birth to a son, a magazine reported Monday.")
Can we estimate the cost of such non-stop favorable campaigning by newspapers and TV? We'd quickly be in the hundreds of millions if not in the billions. And in fact, there isn't a way to put a price on it, because the commodity becomes devalued when it is so relentlessly flogged. For if a newspaper runs too many ads (say by reducing the price of an ad), then customers become unhappy with the product, and the value of the paper as a whole suffers. So one way to evaluate the actual cost to the newspapers of this 18 month spree of free campaign contributions, is to read their bottom line. What happened to the value of the NYT, the WashPo, the LAT?
Media company
EW Scripps (of spelling bee fame) operates 10 TV affiliate stations, and 15 newspapers, the biggest is Rocky Mtn News in Denver, is
down $100M from last year, not including another $50M writeoff, they announced 3 days after the election. And that was a small operation. A slightly bigger operation was the Tribune Corp, that owns the Chicago Trib and bought the failing LA Times for $315M. After declaring their losses at $13bn, the Trib
declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Dec 9. Why? The owner has a complicated explanation, which boils down to falling subscriptions and hence falling advertising.
The
New York Times announced that its ad revenues are down 13%, total revenues down 20% and didn't announce that its stock price is down to 28% of what it was trading in June 2007. What does that come out to in real dollars? It's present market cap is a tad over $1bn, so it has lost $3bn during this campaign. It is now below Gannet (USA Today at $2bn) and WashPo ($4bn). While all the newspapers pushed for Obama, none more assiduously than NYT, and it cost it $3bn.
Well what of WashPo, did it survive the election without losing money? It's
stock held remarkably steady up until Feb 2008, when it proceeded to lose about half its value, or about $4bn lost. And Gannet? Like NYT its been a big shill for Obama, and like NYT had its peak in June 2007 when it traded 7x its present value. That's close to a $12bn loss, if I've calculated it correctly.
Those are just the top players, and I haven't even tried to explore what CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN lost, but they give a general trend. By the law of fat tails, we can sort of double their losses and that pretty much covers all the smaller players. So what do we have?
13 + 3 + 4 + 12 = $32bn x 2 = $64bn in losses in the media industry over this election cycle. But can we attribute all of this to the election?
Hugh Hewitt does, and he's a media insider. But even if only half is due to changing tastes of the populace (and why do they change?), we would still have $32bn or about the size of the Detroit bailout.
America did sell it's soul, but it didn't come cheap. Considering there were some
69M votes for Obama, (versus nearly 60M for McCain) that comes out to about $478 per vote. Of course, not all those 69M votes were in play, and given previous Democratic party votes, perhaps 20M at most were in doubt, making that $1650 per deciding vote. Not that the next election will the voters be anywhere near this expensive. In the words of the famous joke,
"...We've already ascertained what you are, now we are merely haggling over the price"