Managing the media

Media Nation is officially nonpartisan. But I’m not going to pretend to be anything but pleased by the Democrats’ taking back the House and possibly the Senate, too.

Still, there are risks involved. Losing would have been too demoralizing for Democratic Party leaders even to contemplate; but winning puts the Democrats in the position of letting themselves become a symbol of all that’s wrong heading into the 2008 presidential campaign.

Thus the Democrats’ first task must be to figure out how they’re going to manage the media. We’ve all seen how it works. Republican talking points dominate Fox News — essentially a party organ — as well conservative media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Folks at mainstream news organizations, ever terrified of being accused of liberal bias, give voice to those talking points so as to seem balanced, even as they ignore or play down Democratic talking points.

That’s how John Kerry’s idiotic joke, a nonstory, came to dominate the headlines for a couple of days last week, while President Bush’s over-the-top accusations that Democratic opponents of the war in Iraq were guilty of something akin to treason were all but ignored. At a minimum, the Democrats need to emulate Bill Clinton by emphasizing a positive message — but responding like crazed weasels when attacked.

Here are three danger spots the Democrats are going to have to think through immediately. Indeed, if they haven’t already, then they’ll be in trouble by this weekend.

Speaker Pelosi. All across the country, Republicans attempted to hang on in part by casting Nancy Pelosi as a “San Francisco liberal” who would seek to transform the United States into a gay commune. It didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t keep trying. And now that Pelosi is going to become much better known, the attacks on her may prove to be more effective in 2008 than they’ve been in ’06.

To combat this, Pelosi needs to be a highly visible presence — a reassuring figure whose appeal cuts across ideological boundaries, if not necessarily across party lines. She is said to have made it clear to Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., that he’s not going to hold impeachment hearings. That’s smart. No matter how badly the White House has mismanaged the war, the fact is that substantial numbers of Democrats voted in favor of it.

More important, to invoke the old political cliché, she needs to define herself before the Republicans do it for her. She may think she’s well-known. She’s not. At a minimum, she’s got to start making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows and raise her visibility. If she performs well, she’ll be an asset to her party regardless of what Sean Hannity says about her.

Democratic committee chairs. Although Pelosi was the principal symbol invoked by Republicans in the just-ended campaign, they also went hard at liberal Democratic congressmen in line for committee chairs. It’s no surprise that their targets included Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who’s gay, and Charlie Rangel, who’s African-American.

Here the Democrats should concentrate on putting forth an agenda on issues that unite the party. Democrats elected yesterday hold differing views on cultural issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion rights and gun control. So why dive into those issues unless it’s absolutely necessary?

This isn’t an argument for moving to the right. I suspect the Democrats can be as left as they like on the war, the environment, corporate malfeasance and pocketbook issues such as the minimum wage. Rather, it’s an argument for respecting the diversity of the party.

Oversight. The Republicans have been remarkably successful in recent years at casting anyone who even asks questions about national security as unpatriotic. The House has now gained subpoena power, and apparently Pelosi intends to use it in order to examine the conduct of the war. Good.

But the Democrats need to remind the public at every opportunity that this is what’s supposed to happen in wartime — that the war effort would almost certainly be going better today if investigations had taken place earlier.

A few months ago Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, appearing on NPR’s “On Point” to discuss his book “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” blamed Congress more than any other player for abdicating its duties by failing to exercise any oversight. Among other things, he noted that, during World War II, Democratic Sen. Harry Truman held hearings into military contracting scandals presided over by a Democratic president and was hailed as a hero.

During the Vietnam War, another Democratic senator, J. William Fulbright, held hearings that helped fuel the antiwar movement even as a fellow Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, was in the White House.

In other words, oversight is not unpatriotic.