The Wesley Clark Flappette: How the Media Picked a Fake Fight

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Any doubt that this year’s presidential campaign – at least as seen by political journalists – is a soap opera, was expunged last week in what might be called the Great Wesley Clark Flappette.

But while that question was resolved, others emerged, including:

* Is Barack Obama’s campaign inept, excessively timid or both?

* Is John McCain a crybaby?

* Are several prominent political journalists so deficient in reading comprehension that they urgently require remedial literacy lessons?

The furor began Sunday morning, when Clark, the much-decorated and retired general who supports Obama, was challenged by Bob Schieffer [3], the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on his earlier statements that Republican candidate McCain is “untested and untried.”

Considering that McCain has been a prominent senator for years, not to mention a combat veteran who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, the question was reasonable. So was Clark’s reply that while McCain was “a hero to me” and others, his background does not include “executive responsibility.”

Well, Schieffer noted, still reasonably, “Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.”

“Well,” Clark said, “ I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Does anybody? Perhaps a whole bunch of political journalists do. Either that, or there’s some other explanation for why reason then effectively left the building. In print, on the air, on cable and in cyberspace, political coverage for the next 48 hours or so was dominated by Wesley Clark’s slur on John McCain’s service to his country.

Dominated, then, by something that had not occurred.

The McCain campaign started it, issuing the next morning a press release [4] in which several of the Republican’s backers – veterans all – responded to “Gen. Wesley Clark’s Attack on John McCain.”

“If Barack Obama wants to question John McCain’s service to his country,” said retired Admiral Leighton “Snuffy” Smith, “he should have the guts to do it himself and not hide behind his campaign surrogates. If he expects the American people to believe his pledges about a new kind of politics, Barack Obama has a responsibility to condemn these attacks.”

Actually, that wasn’t entirely unreasonable from McCain’s tactical perspective. Anything the Republicans can do to undercut Obama’s image as the practitioner of a “new politics” that eschews personal attacks makes some sense, even if, as in this case, there was no personal attack.

But that’s no excuse for reporters to accept the McCain campaign’s bizarre interpretation of Clark’s comments.

“Retired Gen. Wesley Clark went where no Democrat really truly wants to go on Sunday,” observed ABC News’s Rick Klein [5], “calling into question, in surprisingly sharp language, Sen. John McCain’s military record … Please, find me a single Democrat who thinks it’s good politics to call into question the military credentials of a man who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.”

The line on MSNBC’s “First Read [6]” was that “it seems American presidential politics can’t quite get beyond this question: Just how big of a military hero were you? Yesterday on CBS’s ‘Face The Nation,’ it was Wes Clark questioning McCain’s military record.”

Under the (misleading) headline “Clark Hits McCain’s Military Credentials,” The Politico’s, Josh Kraushaar [7] wrote that Clark “invoked McCain’s military service against him.”

Nor was it just the bloggers. All over the networks Monday and at least into Tuesday morning, the tone of the coverage accepted the McCain campaign spin that Clark had pilloried their candidate. Though few were as absurd as CNN’s Rick Sanchez [8], who said that Clark had been “dissing, some might say swift-boating, John McCain’s military record,” reporters generally acted as though Clark had tried to tarnish the reputation of a hero.

He had not. There is a huge difference between “hitting” someone’s military credentials and questioning whether those credentials qualify their bearer for another, very different, task. Clark did not criticize McCain’s military record, much less “diss” or “Swiftboat” him. And not only had Clark not questioned “how big of a military hero” McCain was, he specifically called McCain “a hero to me.”

Hence the question about remedial literacy lessons. Maybe these guys don’t read so well.

It isn’t that reporters have to defer to Clark. A commentator can certainly disagree with him, as Joe Klein [9] did on Time magazine’s Swampland blog.  “Clark is just plain wrong when he says that ‘getting shot down’ doesn’t qualify as foreign policy experience,” Klein wrote. “I think McCain’s Vietnam War experience gives him important perspective on the horrors of war and should never, ever be discounted – even if McCain’s more recent positions have been unduly bellicose. It’s also just really bad manners on Clark’s part, given the suffering McCain endured.”

One can argue with Klein over that, but at least he criticized Clark for what he said, not for what he didn’t.

In fairness to the reporters, the Obama campaign neither defended Clark nor bothered to point out that he had not, in fact, attacked McCain. Instead, it issued a statement saying that Obama “rejects” Clark’s statement.

Again, there was some tactical rationale here. For Obama, the less said about McCain’s military heroism the better; the Obama-ites want to talk about the economy. And then the Obama advisers didn’t want to step on their own planned big story of the day – Obama’s “patriotism” speech in Independence, Mo.

But that didn’t work. Besides, by being so weak-kneed, the Obama campaign passed up a chance to call attention to McCain’s whininess. He who claims insult where no insult was either intended or conveyed is he who whimpers. The McCain campaign went into full whimper mode.

With a look on his face calling to mind a little boy whose ball, glove and puppy had just been made off with by bullies, McCain wouldn’t say whether he thought Obama should apologize to him.

“If that’s the kind of campaign that Senator Obama and his surrogates and his supporters want to engage, I understand that,” he said, also noting that, “General Clark is not an isolated incident, but I have no way of knowing how much involvement Senator Obama has in that issue. I know he has mischaracterized some of my statements in the past, including our involvement in Iraq.”

Again, this makes some sense, at least in a campaign that’s really a soap opera. The audience usually comes down on the side of the mistreated character. But it has no basis in reality.

With some justification, press critics among the liberal bloggers jumped all over the coverage, implying if not stating outright that it proved the mainstream political media are in the tank for McCain.

Maybe. But it seems just as likely that the mainstream political media are addicted to conflict, especially to conflict that is more personal than political. Note that almost nobody bothered to examine whether Clark might have been right, whether being a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war is relevant experience for the presidency.

Instead, the coverage focused on the likely tactical impact of Clark’s remarks.

In this case, concluding that reporters were not ideologically biased but merely intent on making trouble is not saying much in their defense. Whatever their intent, the result was dishonest. Almost all the accounts used that “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” line without noting that Clark was repeating Schieffer’s words. Almost none of the accounts noted that Clark had specifically called McCain a hero and said he’d honored his service.

Those can’t all be oversights. Those are the deliberate decisions of people who were looking for what to magnify and what to shrink to elevate the anger and insult level. Who cares if you misinform the public as long as you make the soap opera more dramatic?

One relevant footnote here. In saying “General Clark is not an isolated incident,” McCain was referring to the statement made in April by Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

“McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” Rockefeller said. “He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller apologized almost immediately, as he should have. He came close to suggesting that McCain had committed war crimes, an outrageous suggestion when presented without evidence.

Then again, maybe there is some evidence. Why has no reporter looked into what Rockefeller said about McCain’s activities during the war? Like all the other servicemen in Vietnam, McCain was serving his country, for which he deserves his country’s thanks. But we now know that some of those servicemen were asked to perform – and did – acts that many if not most Americans now regret. Does Rockefeller know something that would indicate that McCain was one of those servicemen? Does anyone else?

Those questions shouldn’t be very hard to answer. I suspect that the answers would not diminish John McCain’s reputation. Failure to ask them diminishes the press corps’.