Paul Waldman argues that despite the quadrennial obsession with presidential candidates' character, the press never really asks the tough questions or learns from their mistakes:
Just look at the last eight years. Nearly everything that has made the current presidency such a catastrophe could have been foreseen in 2000 with a clear look at the person of George W. Bush. Yet we were told at the time that what really mattered about George W. Bush was whether he was smart enough and had enough experience to handle the challenges of the Oval Office. That was the character pitfall our wise journalists saw, that the light of his intellect might shine a bit too dimly.
We shouldn't have been surprised, then, when Bush's presidency was marked not just by consistent dishonesty, but by a particularly pernicious brand of dishonesty. Unlike some of his predecessors, Bush's most important lies have come not when he was in crisis or had been caught doing something he shouldn't have (as with Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Iran-Contra, or Clinton and Monica Lewinsky), but as part of a carefully planned effort to overcome potential public opposition to a policy initiative. So he claimed that his tax plan would give most of its benefits to the middle class, and he claimed that Iraq was all but readying its invasion of the United States, not to mention the hundred little lies along the way. ...
And they don't seem to be doing any better today. For instance, John McCain's recent statements about an imaginary alliance between Iran and Al Qaeda was important not because it raised the possibility that McCain has yet to get a handle on who's who in the Middle East (the best efforts of his media defenders to dismiss it as merely a slip of the tongue notwithstanding; as George Will noted, "people say it's a given that this man knows what he's talking about"). The real question is whether McCain suffers from an affliction we might call Bush Bad Guy Syndrome, wherein everyone who doesn't like America gets conflated together into an undifferentiated mass of malevolence; they're surely working together, because they're all Bad Guys. Unlike a simple lack of knowledge, this kind of worldview has real and consequential implications for the decisions that a President McCain might make. Is this incident reflective of McCain's perspective on the world?
Have the gatekeepers failed us? Read and comment here.
--The Editors
