NPR’s Dick Meyer says we aren’t really that politically polarized.
As we gird our collective loins for the result of perhaps the most important U.S. presidential election mankind will ever witness, many are prepared to see the outcome in life or death terms. If McCain wins, devout National Public Radio listening Obama lever pullers will undoubtedly pick up their footballs and begin their search for Canadian real estate. But, are the differences between McCain and Obama, and more importantly, between blue- and red- staters, really that substantial? One pundit who would argue that as a nation Americans have far more in common than anyone acknowledges is NPR’s editorial director of digital media Dick Meyer. In his new book Why We Hate Us—American Discontent in the New Millennium (Crown, 2008), the former CBSnews.com columnist backs up his opinion that we’re not as far apart politically as the cable news services would have us believe. I rang him up recently at his inside-the-beltway digs for some reassurance that no matter who’s elected, the sun actually has a decent chance of coming up November 5.
Paul Kilduff: What caused you to investigate just how polarized Americans are? Did you always feel that way?
Dick Meyer: I think instinctively it just never comported to my experience of the world. I’ve been a political reporter for a long time and started covering campaigns and Congress and national politics in the mid-’80s and it always seemed clear to me that the people who were engaged in politics, whether as activists or just people who passionately argued about it or actually did it for a living as office seekers or congressional aides or political consultants, were very different than everybody else that I knew and they didn’t think about politics in the same way. They didn’t talk about politics in the same way. They had much more coherent and dogmatic views and then I started to notice as cable news got bigger and bigger in the ’90s and there was more talking head “argu-tainment” news that the exaggeration of the differences between people became extreme on television even if not in the world. I was there on the floor at the 1992 Republican convention when Pat Buchanan declared the start of a culture war. The alleged controversy in the culture war at that time was Murphy Brown, the character on television that had a child out of wedlock, remember?
PK: That still pisses me off.
DM: Marilyn Quayle and the Republican National Convention in ’92 said not all of us dropped and did drugs in the 1960s. We’re not all counterculture. Basically saying to most of the people who grew up in the 1960s you’re not welcome in the party. And it was clear to me then that Pat Buchanan and Marilyn Quayle were talking about an America that was just a very small slice of the country and that when you really talk to the vast majority of people, their views about politics are actually eclectic, inconsistent, conservative on some issues, liberal or radical on other issues, but generally practical and generally not particularly ideological—although they might be passionate on a couple of other issues. Then in the 2004 election a weird thing happened which was the exit polls showed that moral values were the most important issues to voters. Well, that was complete malarkey. It was only that way because the exit poll was poorly formed. For instance, economy and jobs were not issues that people could pick for. And taxes were another. If you had put those three things—economy, jobs, and taxes—that would have been the number-one issue and nobody would have been talking about the “moral values” voter in 2004. So I wrote a piece about how the whole explanation for the 2004 election was based on an erroneous exit poll for the Washington Post. This is more than you want to know.
PK: This is the NPR version.
DM: Yeah. God, I’m going to bore this guy to death. Anyway, to make a long story short I got hooked up with a political scientist at Stanford (Professor Morris Fiorina) who has really studied this and I went out to Stanford and spent time with him and really saw that data completely supported what I had been reporting and finding anecdotally for a long time. I’ve always had a visceral objection to this portrait of the nation as divided because I don’t think it is. Granted, I was a little kid in 1968 but I remember what real polarization is and that’s people hitting each over the head with clubs and throwing rocks at each other. This is not a polarized society.
PK: What do you say to all the Obama voters if McCain wins?
DM: What I’d say to somebody who really fears McCain winning is that they’re exaggerating the fragility of the system and the culture. And also underestimating and exaggerating how different McCain and his ilk are than they are. The hot button issues in the campaign are aberrations. They’re issues that have become symbols of things and that ignite real passions but they’re not the meat and potatoes of government. On an issue like the war, obviously there are really important, substantive differences, but chances are in the practical world how Obama and McCain would respond once they went to office might not be that wildly different. The country is not so fragile that it’s going to go to hell in a hand basket because of one administration.
PK: McCain and Obama in our nation-building exercise in Iraq have both said that when we leave depends upon “conditions on the ground.” Given that, is there really that much difference between the two of them—at least on this all-important issue?
DM: I’ve had an emotional roller coaster about this campaign because when Obama and McCain got the nominations I thought it really might be a sign that the country was turning over a new leaf in its politics because I believe both of these guys are people who are honest and have a lot of character and a lot of integrity and are able to march to their own drummer. And I think just as importantly they’re able to convey that through the grotesque Cuisinart of 24/7 media. I actually think there are a fair number of people in politics with character but those who can survive the system and survive the media scrutiny are few and far between and I think these guys could. So now I feel very disappointed that they’ve both waged really low-rent campaigns and haven’t distinguished themselves. I think there are real substantive differences between them, but I think they’re vastly exaggerated. I feel like it’s a kind of Groundhog Day situation where the country’s told for two years you can only talk about two baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Yankees. Everyday you can only talk about those two teams. Yeah, there are differences, but how much can you analyze it? How boring does it get after two years?
PK: Okay, then what exactly are the key differences between these guys?
DM: I think that probably that McCain goes into government thinking that more government is almost always bad. That the government is capable of solving relatively few problems and creating many problems. I think his impulse is against regulation and intervention and I think that he’s much more focused on foreign policy and security policy than Obama. I think Obama is much more a believer that government can help the worse off in society and he’s a much firmer believer that government can solve problems rather than make problems.
PK: So that’s a traditional breakdown between Democrats and Republicans.
DM: These guys have completely traditional platforms. There’s nothing innovative policy-wise about either of them. McCain’s career has been innovative in his constant support for campaign-finance reform and against pork barrel spending which reflect his anti-authoritarian posture and so he’s been an unorthodox politician in that regard. In terms of policy, I think Obama’s an absolute standard-issue Democrat. He’s a sort of a centrist to liberal Democrat. There’s nothing innovative in his policy thinking at all as far as I can see.
PK: If it really does come down to who America wants to belly up to the bar with, who wins?
DM: I like them both. I think they’re two of our best politicians. I dislike the two party–system intensely. I think our perspective is so distorted that we believe that there is a huge difference between the parties when in fact there is a substantial difference but it’s not huge. They both buy into a system that is completely devoted to putting campaigning over governing. And that’s the fundamental corruption of the system. What politicians do for a living is centered around re-election. It’s not centered around governing. And if you look again in the biggest picture there has been no landmark, enduring legislation that historians will remember in 150 years since the 1960s. And the reason for that is that the American people have not trusted either party with a huge chunk of power since Watergate. Elections have been close, Congress has been divided, the White House has been in one party and Congress has been in another in various forms consistently since Watergate because that’s the way voters have expressed their mistrust for both parties. I think the healthiest thing for the system would be to have a President who is not a Democrat or a Republican, because, yes, they have important differences on policy, but they buy into the same structure and the structure is fundamentally corrupt.
PK: So where is this strong third party going to come from?
DM: I think it’s very unlikely to happen. I am like a Don Quixote on this. You remember two years ago there was this thing called Unity ’08 where a bunch of wise men and former Democratic consultants and Republican consultants and office holders led by Ham Jordan, who just died a few weeks ago—Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff—and they said, “What does it take to get this country to realize that there are manmade, solvable problems out there that have existed now for decades like entitlement spending and social security and taking care of old people and getting medical insurance to everybody? These are all solvable problems that aren’t being solved because of this bickering. So let’s pick a Democrat and a Republican, put ‘em on the ticket and try to shake things up a little bit.” And I relentlessly shilled for them and I wrote several columns. And it didn’t add to anything. I’ve always been a booster of Ralph Nader. Anybody who’s out there for a third party I’m for. The parties have a duopoly on political power and political monies. I don’t think it’s very likely to change.
PK: Isn’t it a little insulting of McCain to pick a complete lightweight like Sarah Palin as his running mate?
DM: I understand what you mean. I think it’s cavalier. I do think it’s kind of insulting to the country to put somebody who is that clearly unqualified. And the more exposure you get to her you realize she is just not as conversant and sophisticated about a repertoire of issues as anybody we’ve seen on the national scene for a long time. The instant conservative response to what I just said is, “Well, she’s got just as much experience as Barack Obama.” Okay, you can say that they’ve sort of been in elective office about the same amount of time and been involved in their communities for about the same amount of time, but there’s a huge difference. Obama has been in the big leagues for four years. Now four years is not a huge amount of time, granted, but it is the big leagues and she’s never been in the big leagues. Obama has four years of national scrutiny and national testing and say what you want, that’s the pool of people that national leaders come from and he’s acquitted himself well enough to get more votes in the Democratic primary than Hillary Clinton, who’s very powerful and skilled, and John Edwards, who is—not. That’s really different than, “Yeah, she’s been a governor for two years and she was a mayor and, so, on some really superficial level she has roughly the same quantum of experience as Obama.” Obama’s been in the big leagues and Palin never has. But on the other hand, I feel like it was a complex choice for McCain.
PK: A good marketing move?
DM: I just don’t know. I don’t have any inside knowledge into why she was selected.
PK: Because she can see Russia from her backyard perhaps?
DM: I used to cover McCain and my sense is that at the core he is—and this is, of course, why I have a soft spot for him that I admit to—anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian and mischievous and I really do believe that at his core McCain believes a lot of Washington is corrupt. And I don’t think that George Bush thought that (either George Bush). I don’t think Kerry thought that. I don’t think Clinton thought that. I don’t think Bill Clinton thought that. I don’t think Gore thought that. I don’t even think Obama thinks that. And I think McCain does think that and I’ve seen the guy get exercised about crazy stuff that would make anybody exercised—pork-barrel silliness, wasting taxpayers’ money to secure your job. So I do think that there’s a rebellious part of McCain that was expressed in picking Palin but I think it was cavalier as well as irresponsible.
PK: President Palin? Sounds like a national tragedy doesn’t it?
DM: I don’t know. I doubt that it would be.
PK: So, you’re ready for that?
DM: No, it’s not that I’m ready for President Palin. I do have a belief in the reliance of the system. I mean we survived President Nixon. We’ve survived a lot. Some of the meatballs before the Civil War. Ulysses Grant and a bottle of Scotch? Woodrow Wilson in a coma? I mean lots of things have happened in history.
PK: Some are saying this is the first time that the VP choice will really make a difference. What say you?
DM: No. I think it’s irrelevant just like it’s always irrelevant.
PK: So, who’s going to win?
DM: I have no idea. I would not be surprised either way. I am not especially interested in the business of predicting. I resent massively the length of time it takes to select a President. This is a 23-month campaign. I think it’s literally a sign of political disease that we folk take so long to do this. I mean every other industrial, developed Western democracy can pick its leader in 12 weeks or under. Most do it in either six to eight weeks. And the fact that it’s taking us 23 months, it’s repugnant.
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Age: Almost 50 | Astrological sign: Libra Come on.
Birthplace: Glencoe, Ill.
First “real” job: Depends how real “real” is. First paid job was as a laborer at a florist and nursery store. Next was as a cowhand, then a bartender.
Favorite pizza topping and/or Jonas Brother: Anchovies, no Jonas.
Mideast peace plan: I am four-square in support of peace on earth.
