Quote of the day: "Thinking big" gets most columnists in trouble, but when E. J. Dionne Jr. talks about a changed America, we'll listen

"In 1984 three exit polls pegged Ronald Reagan's share of the ballots cast by Americans under 30 at between 57 and 60 percent. Reagan-style conservatism seemed fresh, optimistic and innovative. In 2006 voters under 30 gave 60 percent of their votes to Democratic House candidates, according to the shared media exit poll. Conservatism now looks old, tired and ineffectual."
--E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column today, "'The Real America,' Redefined" (you'll find the complete column text down below, following the ranting)

AND WHEN DIONNE TALKS ABOUT JON STEWART'S AND
STEPHEN COLBERT'S YOUTH APPEAL, WE REALLY HEAR HIM

I really don't want to attempt to paraphrase Dionne's argument, which I think we should let him make. But I do want to add one note, with regard to his point about the role played in this new "Real America" he sees by today's "cool commentators," Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Speaking personally, I don't know how I would have gotten through the Bush nightmare without The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (to give the show its proper full title for once). I would say the same thing about the intrepid New York Times trio of (in alphabetical order!) Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, who could always be counted on to cut through the blanket of bullshit, even when their employer's news coverage couldn't. And eventually there was Air America Radio, and in particular (again, for me, at least) its brilliant and tragically short-lived morning show, Morning Sedition.

But what gave me heart especially about The Daily Show was the clear evidence that it was reaching a young audience, which struck me as desperately important. As Dionne puts it, "Stewart and Colbert speak especially to young Americans who rely on their sensible take on the madness that surrounds us. The young helped drive their popularity, and the Droll Duo in turn shaped a new, anti-conservative skepticism."

I raise the point now because it was utterly lost on the chuckleheads at Air America Radio when they pulled the plug on the network's greatest (perhaps only) innovation, Morning Sedition. Now this is no knock on Al Franken or Randi Rhodes or Sam Seder or other people I'm probably forgetting. They're all great. And especially it's no knock on Rachel Maddow (left)--it's to Air America Radio programmers' credit that they allowed Rachel to figure out how to use the medium, to the point where she does the best progressive-information broadcast I can imagine. (At least I assume she's still doing it in her posh evening time slot--or afternoons out West, where I gather they didn't used to hear her at all. I'm happy that people who never got to hear her before are hearing her now. Unfortunately, it's just not a radio-friendlly time for me.)

But these are all, essentially, programs for those of us who know what we believe and what to hear it reflected on the air waves. Morning Sedition, thanks to its lucky mix of producers and writers and performers and especially the explosive presence of Marc Maron (right) was a wild and often wicked melange of progressive rant and belly-flopping comedy, offering entertainment and politics, not separately, but as a single package, with real potential for listener outreach. When the suits pulled the plug on it, they were thumbing their noses at their one programming initiative with real potential to reach young audiences.

I should add that I'm really curious about the latest morning-slot occupants, The Young Turks (left), especially since the morning is when I desperately need a radio show. The problem is that we don't get The Young Turks here in New York City, where--as of the last time the local station was downgraded--we are stuck with some freak show featuring, of all people, right-wing dunderhead "Army" Williams. (I know I've asked this question before, and I know other people have asked it as well, but isn't he part of the right-wing media circus that Air America Radio is supposed to be doing battle against?)

Radio is a cutthroat business. I understand that. And a heavily politicized cutthroat business at that, with its dominant player, Clear Channel, as interested in its political agenda as its bottom line. (The two are closely connected, after all. And while I believe it's possible for an AAR-affiliated station to make money, it's probably not possible to rake in the kind of profits that would move the Clear Channel brass to let those stations be.) But is it really not possible for all those famously powerful and connected media and business liberals we're always hearing about to do something to help find decent, stable, audible stations around the country to form a real progressive network? The fact is that, especially considering its short history, Air America Radio is overflowing with high-quality programming

The New York experience is shameful. However the strategy was conceived, the effect was to go after first one, and then another, of the city's most marginal AM stations, which were serving some of the city's least-served population groups. How well or badly they were being served, I can't say, but is it really the role of progressive radio to squeeze out what little radio coverage is aimed at local Caribbean and African-American communities? And they're crappy stations to boot. As far as I can tell, even fewer people in the metropolitan area can even receive the current AAR affiliate, WWRL, than could receive its predecessor, WLIB.

I understand that these are all high-pressured economic issues only properly understood by real radio people. Doesn't anybody in the progressive community know any real radio people?

P.S.: I'll bet even now, if somebody tried to reassemble a lot of the old Morning Sedition team, with a mandate to go back to what they were doing, and do it more and better, and this time we'll really promote the heck out of that sucker, so that everyone who might enjoy it finds about it, why, I'll bet a lot of them could be lured back from whatever they're doing. Because one of the secrets of that show, I suspect, was that those people were by golly having fun!

Well, that's what I wanted to say. We have possibly drifted off the topic of E. J. Dionne Jr.'s column. Or then again, maybe we haven't. Anyway, here it is for you to read:

'The Real America,' Redefined

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006; A29

When a nation alters its philosophical direction and changes its assumptions, there is no press release to announce the shift, no news conference where The People declare that they have decided to move down a different path.

Yet 2006 is looking more and more like one of history's hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways. The changes in politics and culture are visible in the many sudden and outright reversals of the conventional wisdom.

Nowhere is the evidence of change more striking than among the young, whose attitudes and behavior are usually leading indicators of social transformation.

In 1984 three exit polls pegged Ronald Reagan's share of the ballots cast by Americans under 30 at between 57 and 60 percent. Reagan-style conservatism seemed fresh, optimistic and innovative. In 2006 voters under 30 gave 60 percent of their votes to Democratic House candidates, according to the shared media exit poll. Conservatism now looks old, tired and ineffectual.

When the right seemed headed to dominance in the early 1990s, the hot political media trend was talk radio and the star was Rush Limbaugh, a smart entrepreneur who spawned imitators around the country and all across the AM dial.

Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their brilliant ridicule of the Bush administration and conservative bloviators satisfies a political craving at least as great as the one Limbaugh once fed. Stewart and Colbert speak especially to young Americans who rely on their sensible take on the madness that surrounds us. The young helped drive their popularity, and the Droll Duo in turn shaped a new, anti-conservative skepticism.

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled--often looking ridiculous in the process--to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that accusing opponents of wanting to "cut and run" in Iraq would be enough to cast political enemies into an unpatriotic netherworld of wimps and "defeatocrats."

Now the burden of proof is on those who claim that fighting in Iraq was a good idea and that the situation can be turned around. The Iraq Study Group's grim description of what's going on is the accepted definition of reality. Polls show majorities embracing the report not, I suspect, because most Americans are conversant with its every detail but because they see its take as closer to the truth than the president's accounts over the past three years, and because it appears to point toward disengagement.

Since the 1970s, supply-side conservatives have been brilliantly successful in redefining economic thinking. They shifted the popular focus from workers to entrepreneurs, from incomes to wealth, from job creation to share-price increases, and from government policy innovation to private-sector autonomy.

Suddenly economic inequality is a problem even conservatives are taking seriously. Corporate America is looked upon, let us say, in less heroic terms. Economic security is no longer a dirty phrase, and staunch capitalists aren't quite so eager to preach the virtues of "creative destruction" to displaced industrial workers. Government--with some wariness, to be sure--is being invited back into the economic story to redress grievances and to right imbalances.

How durable are these changes? In both politics and culture, the side that thinks it's losing usually accommodates itself to the ascendant order. My hunch is that we will be seeing many new claims to moderation and social concern on the right and many fewer fake NASCAR fans on the left.