To All Those New York City Journalists Horrified By Cruz’s Jab: Get Over Yourselves

By Alex Griswold

Friday, January 15, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz made a jab against Donald Trump during Thursday night’s debate, saying the Manhattan businessman was ill-suited to be the Republican nominee because he still espoused “New York values.”

That attack provoked angry responses from New York’s journalism and media elites, liberal and conservative alike. There were literally too many tweets from that night to cite here, but Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi summed up New York journalists’ thoughts about Cruz’s rather succinctly.

Can all of New York take the day off tomorrow to kick Ted Cruz's ass?

I’m sure most New Yorkers laughed off or brushed off Cruz’s comments. This column isn’t for you. But to the New Yorkers– especially those in the media– who are legitimately angry at Cruz for his comments: get over yourselves.

First lets nail down what Cruz actually said that got everyone so hot and bothered:

    And listen, there are many, many wonderful, wonderful working men and women in the state of New York. But everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro- gay-marriage, focus around money and the media.

    …

    You know, the concept of New York values is not that complicated to figure out. Not too many years ago, Donald did a long interview with Tim Russert. And in that interview, he explained his views on a whole host of issues that were very, very different from the views he’s describing now. And his explanation — he said, “look, I’m from New York, that’s what we believe in New York. Those aren’t Iowa values, but this is what we believe in New York.” And so that was his explanation.

    I guess I can frame it another way. Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.

First of all– and most importantly– note that Cruz points out that Trump himself said once he had different “values” than Iowans simply because he was from New York City. That alone ought to make the attack against Trump a legitimate one; the notion that all New Yorkers think the same is a vast oversimplification, but that is how Trump framed the issue sixteen years ago.

As I read it, the “New York values” line wasn’t intended as an attack on New York City, or even New Yorkers themselves. Instead, he was saying that Republicans (and South Carolinians and Iowans) espouse certain values, and New Yorkers tend not to. He certainly implied “New York values” were a bad thing… but only within the context of the nomination for a right-wing party. I expect Democrats are equally wary of “Birmingham values.”

The notion that it’s somehow outrageous to say New York has different values than the rest of the country is, to put it bluntly, stupid. No less than the public editor of The New York Times recognized this fact a decade ago, when Daniel Okrent said in a column that “of course” the paper had a liberal bias. He argued that the bias didn’t derive from any vast left wing conspiracy or intentional malice. Instead, he noted that the paper’s editors, reporters, and columnists were all New Yorkers, and they simply have a different “value system” than the rest of the country.

    [On gay marriage], Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of a management fiat, but because getting outside of one’s value system takes a great deal of self-questioning.

    Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times’ readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper’s heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.

Countless polls have proven the truth of his and Cruz’s words. Generally speaking, New Yorkers’ political and cultural views– read: their “values”– do not resemble those of America at large. That’s not a good or bad thing (the same could be said of Liberty University), it’s just a fact.

But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo disagreed, saying to a receptive audience on MSNBC and CNN this morning that Cruz’s statement was “anti-American” and offensive to gays and women(?).

    It was… highly offensive. And not just because I’m the New York Governor. I mean it was anti-American. It wasn’t just anti-New York right. In 30 seconds the man was offensive to gays, he was offensive to women by attacking pro-choice women. And this is what he does. This is the politics of division, right. And it’s also why this country’s in a situation it’s in…

But where did Cruz get the idea that “New York values” are incompatible with the more conservative values that prevail in the heartland? How about from Cuomo himself:

    Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

So even after being told by the freaking Governor of New York himself that conservatives aren’t welcome, it’s somehow below the belt to say they have different values.

What Okrent described a decade ago goes beyond just The New York Times. Every single person living in what New Yorkers sneeringly call “flyover country” has to deal with nonstop jokes, jabs, and attacks from the East Coast-based media that their way of life, their hobbies, their faith, their politics, and everything about them is backwards, oppressive, anti-woman, anti-gay, contrary to real American values, and just plain uncultured. From Family Guy to the nightly news to Girls to NPR to Glee to Jon Stewart, every Middle American has been told a thousand times how they are nothing but a dumb hick or a pathetic repressed suburbanite.

Southerners and Westerners and Midwesterners have spent their entire lives shrugging off these affronts. But as soon as one person insinuates that something’s rotten in the Big Apple, the same people who guffawed along to all those NASCAR and country music jokes are aghast. Please.

Quick question to my New York media friends; how many of you have made “Florida man” jokes recently? You know, the joke about all those crazy headlines that involve people from Florida getting involved in bizarre arrests and incidents? Now maybe I’m missing the actual joke, but the punchline seems to be that Florida is full of backwards drunken hillbillies and loons who can’t stay out of trouble.

So yeah, mocking entire states doesn’t usually register on the outrage meter. Returning to our good friend Mr. Taibbi, less than an hour after taking offense to the attack on New York, he started trashing another state without a shred of self-awareness.

I love how immigration is the number one issue in South Carolina, where no immigrant not being punked by a travel agent will go.

But that’s different, right? The South is just bad and gross and not nearly as cool and hip as New York.

Personally, I live in downtown Washington, D.C. and listen to politicians and pundits every election cycle trash our city as corrupt and out-of-touch with everyday Americans. I don’t take offense to those criticisms because a) I recognize that attacks on “D.C. values” are really attacks on D.C.’s elites and not its everyday citizens, and b) those attacks are absolutely correct.

I suspect that if Cruz had stood up and denounced “Washington D.C. values” on that stage, no one would be clutching their pearls or pointing out that the D.C. area was also targeted on 9/11. I suspect that if Cruz attacked “Berkeley values” or “San Francisco values,” you’d see some eye-rolling from liberals but nothing more. Everyone would have understood his meaning perfectly, even if they didn’t agree: people from those places are very liberal and sequestered, and I’m not.

But he attacked New York City, so now we have to make a big hullabaloo about whether that undermines our national unity or some crap. The fact that the nation’s media is almost entirely based out of New York is simply a massive coincidence.

I think the greatest irony about this whole controversy is how quickly some New Yorkers jumped to prove Cruz’s point. You have Mr. Taibbi above, joking about kicking his ass. A small, irrelevant New York tabloid featured a cover with the State of Liberty flipping the bird. The Governor of New York took Cruz’s entirely factual statement that New Yorkers are more likely to be pro-abortion, and hyperventilates that it’s somehow “anti-women.”

Here’s a news flash to those New Yorkers; profanity, uber-political correctness, condescension and incredibly smug liberalism are precisely the stereotypes we tar you with.

Cruz isn’t an idiot; the amount of everyday Americans who hold to those stereotypes far, far, far outnumber those who would be offended hearing him badmouth the city that has badmouthed them nonstop. And every time the media gives airtime to those comments and persists in feigning outrage, they only drive voters in Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada, Florida, and elsewhere straight into his waiting arms.