The Devolution Will Be Televised

Steve Benen notes (and Atrios echoes his pique) that John McCain is slated to appear this Sunday in yet another of what has come to seem an endless cavalcade of high-profile big media interviews.

[T]he Sunday shows' obsession with McCain… [is] so absurd. The Arizona Republican, after a wildly unsuccessful presidential campaign, is just another conservative member of a 40-seat minority. McCain isn't playing a role in any important negotiations; he hasn't unveiled any significant pieces of legislation; he isn't being targeted as a swing vote on any major bills; and he's not a member of the GOP leadership. He's just another far-right senator, with precious little to say that couldn't have been predicted in advance….

Eric Boehlert… found that John Kerry, in the eight months after Bush's second inaugural, made three appearances on the Sunday morning shows. McCain's total, obviously, more than quadruples that number.

The insinuation here is that corporate media are investing marginal and discredited Republican views and figures with undue weight, while disregarding and denigrating extremely popular and sound Democratic views and the figures who advocate them.

And of course this is surely part of the story here: Given that the bland gossips of corporate media tend not to have much in the way of intelligence, talent, or charisma to justify either their salaries or their influence they have a natural affinity for Movement Republicans who -- however clownish, clumsy, blustering, and hypocritical the spectacle they are making of themselves from moment to moment may happen to be -- are struggling to preserve a world in which precisely such talentless clueless parochial twits can celebrate themselves as indispensable elites.

Our punditocrats never tires of dismissing center-left proposals and figures -- however soundly argued, however widely supported -- as foul-smelling emanations from dirty crazy unserious hippies. No doubt this is in large part because they know in their heart of hearts that however catastrophic and brutal the anti-intellectualism parochialism and intolerance of the Republicans they have incomparably less chance of actually maintaining their positions and perks in a more equitable and diverse secular democratic order (even as they lounge and chatter in the urbane milieus only secular democracy could maintain), than amidst the hicks and hypocrites of stubborn incumbency.

So, yes, I take Benen's and Atrios' point, of course, about the ugliness of the near daily blowjob corporate media gives Not President Grumpy McAncient. However, all that aside, isn't it also true that part of the reason this loser keeps getting so much attention simply because McCain represents something of a gravity well in the current mediated-attention landscape? People do actually know who McCain is, even if they didn't like what they saw particularly, and he is a figure who is now and has long participated in government on the National stage.

While it's true, strictly speaking, that McCain is not "a member of the GOP leadership" as Benen notes, the fact is that the GOP doesn't have anything like a real leadership, certainly not among its actual leaders. It makes a certain sense to treat McCain as a leader in a moment when the leader otherwise is going to end up being Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. There is a non-negligible sense in which the GOP won't be able to cough up a leader that can pass muster in media terms until a "credible" challenger to Obama for the Presidency claws her or his way out of the pack.

Rather than see this state of affairs as nefarious corporate mediated flogging for Movement Conservatism, then, the prominence of McCain may actually symptomize yet again how utterly devastated the GOP finds itself in the aftermath of its disastrous run of actually getting what it wanted and actually trying to govern on the basis of its "principled" hostility to the very notion of governing.

That means that McCain's visibility is good news for Democrats, not for the GOP. I think Democrats have grown so habituated to everything endlessly going against them however strong their arguments, however popular their positions, however desperate the problems they would address, however flabbergastingly irrational their opponents, that they tend to see and expect the worst in things as they play out. But for the life of me I can't see how the GOP benefits from having Not President McCain on the tee vee every week grumbling Not Presidentially about how much better it would be if we were building more bombs right about now.