Jesus Was Not A Centrist-- In Fact Almost No One Who Accomplished Anything Worthwhile Was

Make America Great Again-- But For Real This Time

Basically, Bernie began his career fighting for working families. Biden began his fighting for segregation. Last week an Ipsos poll for Reuters asked Democratic primary voters who was best in a series of issues Democrats are considering using to help guide them to a candidate to face Trump next year. Relevant results:

• Health care

Bernie- 27%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 12%
Mayo- 5%

• Environment

Bernie- 22%
Elizabeth- 13%
Status Quo Joe- 12%
Mayo- 6%

• Economy/Jobs

Bernie- 22%
Status Quo Joe- 18%
Elizabeth- 14%
Mayo- 5%

• Immigration

Bernie- 18%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 7%

• Strong Progressive

Bernie- 24%
Elizabeth- 17%
Status Quo Joe- 13%
Mayo- 7%

• A new and difference voice

Bernie- 18%
Elizabeth- 18%
Mayo-n 15%
Status Quo Joe- 10%

• Most likely to beat Trump

Status Quo Joe- 31%
Bernie- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 4%

So Bernie’s the favorite to be the nominee, right? Not the favorite of the media or punditocracy. And when you ask those same voters who they would vote for it. The election were today...

• Status Quo Joe- 25%
• Bernie- 19%
• Elizabeth- 13%
• Mayo- 6%
• Bloomberg- 6%
• Yang- 3%

And actual match-ups with all voters-- not just Democrats-- show Biden beating Trump 39-35% (plus 4), Bernie beating him 40-36% (plus 4), Elizabeth beating him 38-36% (plus 2), Bloomberg beating him 36-35% (plus 1) and Mayo losing to him 36-35% (minus 1). Something’s wrong here. And David Leonhardt tried tackling this disconnect for his NY Times readers this week: How ‘Centrist Bias’ Hurts Sanders And Warren. Leonrardt looked at his colleagues in the media. He started with former Washington Post political editor-- more recently a founder of insistently centrist website, Politico-- John Harris. “Last month, Harris wrote a column that I can’t get out of my head. In it, he argued that political journalism suffers from ‘centrist bias.’ As he explained, ‘This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.’”

The bias caused much of the media to underestimate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016. It also helps explain the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.

Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. It’s an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets-- national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks-- really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.

In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.

But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.

This seemingly radical possibility turns out to be quite common, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-- author of the classic book, The Vital Center, no less-- pointed out. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.”

Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible. This year’s Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: Are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?

The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: Are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?

I recently took a detailed look through the coverage of the wealth tax, favored by both Sanders and Warren, and centrist bias seeps through much of it. The coverage has slanted negative, filled with the worries that centrists have — that the tax wouldn’t work in practice or would slow economic growth.

Experts who favor a wealth tax, like Gene Sperling, Felicia Wong and Heather Boushey, or whose academic research suggests it would work, like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, have received less attention than experts who don’t like the idea. For that matter, the complaints of obscure billionaires have gotten more attention than the arguments of sympathetic experts. “Billionaire whining about a wealth tax,” as Ilyana Kuziemko, a Princeton economist who’s sympathetic to a wealth tax, told me, mostly isn’t newsworthy.

I’m not suggesting that journalists lather the wealth tax with praise. There are real questions about it, and journalists are supposed to be skeptical. I’m also not suggesting that Sanders or Warren is necessarily the best nominee. As regular readers know, I’m a moderate on Medicare, immigration and college debt, among other subjects. John Harris, for his part, confesses to “a pretty strong bout” of centrist bias.

But maybe that’s why we recognize it and pine for more objective coverage. Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one. If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?

Once you start thinking about centrist bias, you recognize a lot of it. It helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat. (Well-funded deficit advocacy plays a role too.) Centrist bias also helps explain the credulousness of early coverage during the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, largely supported each war.

The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be. Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do-- no less, no more.

Mostly they're right. And one thing we know for sure... the rightists and corporatists and net-libs never are. So... how about a Christmas gift for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who's been right about everything and torn apart by a biased media day in and day out for decades and decades and now most of all?

Norman Solomon put it slightly more… directly this week. “For the United States,” he wrote, “oligarchy is the elephant-- and donkey-- in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it. Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word ‘oligarchy’ was heard once. ‘We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,’ Bernie Sanders said, ‘where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.’ Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy-- defined as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes’-- can’t really be a democracy. The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.”

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”-- Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar-- for “offering a more positive future.”

…The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign-- from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

…Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country-- from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis—can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.