You don’t have to be a Michele Bachmann fan to savor the way she turned the tables on a bullying Chris Matthews on election night.
When she refused to let the inquisitorial MSNBC host budge her from her scripted economic message, he resorted to taunting: Was she “hypnotized”? Under a “trance”? Nah, she retorted, the people had finally awoken from their nightmare, she was thrilled — even if, Chris, “that thrill is maybe not quite so tingly on your leg anymore.”
Yes, there had been an uncanny touch of animatronic vacancy in Bachmann’s glassy-eyed recitation of canned answers — but what elected official wouldn’t try to stick to the approved talking points on national TV on the night of a historic power shift in Washington? As Matthews knows as well as anyone, it’s called “message discipline” when politicians you support (or even merely respect) do the same. Indeed, you could say Matthews — an early version, Chris Classic — wrote the book on it. In “Hardball,” his 1988 how-to-manual for the professional politician, he devoted a full chapter (“The Press is the Enemy”) to the rules for interacting with a predatory press on one’s own terms rather than theirs.
But Matthews’ needling was a display not only of bad manners and bad faith — it was bad journalism. He achieved no journalistic objective. He got nothing from Bachmann except a stinging riposte. She emerged without a scratch. He was left straining mawkishly to wrap himself in the American flag.
And Michele Bachmann isn’t exactly elusive prey, as Anderson Cooper demonstrated in his interview with her the night after she rope-a-doped Matthews. Instead of trying to coerce viewer contempt for Bachmann, Cooper let her earn it. Focused, persistent — and unfailingly civil — Cooper bored in with relevant, substantive questions. It turned out the congresswoman had no idea who the source was for her claim that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million per day; she hadn’t even thought to question the accuracy of the suspicious figure, multiples larger than any plausible sum. But Bachmann-Cooper was more than gotcha journalism; the exchange revealed a disturbing potential for the very sort of reckless, McCarthyite demagoguery Matthews tried to pin on Bachmann before getting carried away by his own theatrics. (Cooper’s results supply an answer, incidentally, to the pained query MSNBC’s Chris Jansing posed here to The Daily Caller’s S.E. Cupp.)
When Cooper pressed for specific budget cuts — other than the trillions in savings promised by teleconference summitry, of course — that would credibly attack the federal deficit, the congresswoman repeatedly ducked, before vaguely citing “eligibility” (presumably for the broadly popular entitlement benefits she was too scared even to name). Here, she exposed a strong instinct for garden variety political hypocrisy, an especially telling weakness in someone aggressively branding herself as a fearless conviction politician.
Of course, there’s something a little depressing about this instructive study in journalistic contrasts, namely its instructive contrast in commercial returns. The Matthews-Bachmann video, devoid of journalistic value, went viral. But by the time you read this, even Anderson Cooper may have forgotten his own, far meatier interview. No, Matthews can’t be overjoyed to be the occasion for nationwide schadenfreude. But his bosses at MSNBC are surely getting a tingly thrill from the spike in traffic to their website.
The Matthews-Bachmann interview was a sticky, clicky tasting menu of new media values. Partisan cage fight: Check. Identity-reinforcing validation of ideological preconceptions: Check. (See, Matthews is a foaming partisan masquerading as a journalist; Bachmann is a Heather at mid-life, on Paxil.) And even (in the form of Matthews’ on-camera reversal) a piquant dollop of the guilty amusement afforded by a YouTube video of a distracted toddler pedaling his trike into a tree trunk: Check.
What’s an Anderson Cooper to do? He’s done the tsunami, the hurricane, the quake … Pray for a meteor strike? Maybe a dustbowl?
Daniel Wattenberg is a writer in Washington, D.C. His recent articles include an essay in the December issue of Playboy on the impending political marginalization of the NRA and an expose in the August issue of Reason on the scapegoating of basketball star Gilbert Arenas.