Oct/08©Chris Farley
Gwen Ifill and the Debate
The Vice Presidential debate is tonight and the Republicans are already looking for a way to cover in case Palin doesn’t deliver. The moderator is a woman so they won’t be able to whine about the sexist coverage in the media and the moderator is a fair, unbiased journalist – a characteristic which drives Republicans crazy…with annoyance.
They’ll probably try to whine about the “gotcha” questions. They have a problem though. Not every question for which the candidate does not have an adequate answer is a “gotcha” question. And not having good answers doesn’t endear the candidate to anyone with a middle school education.
So now they’re fixated on the moderator, Gwen Ifill. I’ve written before about how I’m a big fan of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, for which Ifill is a correspondent. PBS is about as fair as they come and I’ve always appreciated their philosophy, characterized by this Jim Lehrer quote: ”..I am not in the entertainment business.” But the McCain campaign has fixated on a book that Ifill is writing called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.
First of all, no one has actually read the book, so it’s not fair to jump to conclusions based on manufactured information. All we have is an Amazon.com book summary:
“In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.
Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the “black enough” conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.”
So the book is obviously not just about Obama, nor is Obama really the subject of the book. Ifill is trying to make a broader point about African Americans in politics. Obama is the clearest example of that, so it makes sense that Ifill would include him. He has defined this era for African Americans in politics.
But Orin Hatch seems to turn what I’m sure will be a scholarly exploration of African Americans in politics into an Obama bias. He wrote:
“Watch out.
“Sarah Palin is being set up.
“The moderator of tonight’s debate is in the tank for Obama — this liberal PBS reporter is releasing a pro-Obama book . . . to debut on inauguration day.”
The Republicans are looking for some way to bail themselves out of a potential disaster. And Orin Hatch is brilliantly demonstrating the abandonment of integrity for party politics. PBS is not liberal and there is no evidence that the book is pro-Obama. The only people being set up are the American people and they’re not being set up by Gwen Ifill or even Barack Obama. They’re being set up by John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican party.