By Jim Geraghty
Monday, April 13, 2015
Nashville — The cultural gap between those who vote in
the Republican presidential primaries and those who cover the candidates in
those primaries is now a chasm.
One by one, the media covering the Republican
presidential candidates attach some quickly assembled defining flaw to each
candidate: “Rand Paul has a temper problem with the media”; “Ted Cruz is an
unelectable extremist”; “Scott Walker’s lack of a completed college degree is
likely to be a major problem.”
All of these flaws are in the eye of the media beholder.
Ordinary Americans don’t particularly care if Rand Paul is brusque with
interviewers; they have a low opinion of journalists already. Ted Cruz’s ideas
are much less “extreme” outside of newsrooms. And only about one-third of
Americans have a bachelor’s degree, making Scott Walker closer to the “average
American” than everyone else in the field.
A lot of members of the media who are covering the GOP
presidential candidates have exceptionally little in common with the voters who
will select the Republican nominee. Thus, when the Republican candidates make
their pitch to grassroots conservatives, the hot-take instant analysis from the
big media voices usually concludes that the pitch was a belly flop. But the GOP
candidates aren’t trying to win votes in the New York and D.C. newsrooms, and
in a spectacular failure of empathy and understanding, a lot of reporters
simply can’t grasp the hopes, fears, and priorities of GOP-leaning voters in
places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina . . . and Tennessee.
If you’re a particular kind of snot-nosed urban
progressive, the NRA Convention — this year held in the country-music capital
of the world, Nashville — is the perfect opportunity for smug eye-rolling,
relished disdain, and incredulous scoffing that people actually live and think
like this in the year 2015.
The event offers a buffet table of everything the
progressive Left scorns and abhors. Start with kids and teens picking up
inoperative pistols and rifles in the “nine acres of guns and gear” in the
exhibit hall. They’re surrounded by more than 70,000 attendees, many clad in
American-flag gear, Harley Davidson T-shirts, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and
bolo ties. They browse the wares and move on to conference seminars like
“Survival Mindset: Are You Prepared?” and “Sheepdogs! The Bulletproof Mind for
the Armed Citizen.”
The Leadership Forum began with the national anthem, an
invocation from Ollie North that mentioned Jesus Christ, and the Pledge of
Allegiance. Before the event, Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” and the Charlie
Daniels Band’s “Let Freedom Ring” blared from the loudspeakers above enormous
banners declaring, “If they can ban one, they can ban them all.”
It’s a gathering for saints and sinners, with the prayer
breakfast inside and a street preacher and two convention attendees arguing
about the King James Bible outside. But the convention’s sights also include
booth babes and women in tight gold dresses, and at night the attendees move on
to the bars, where the wait-staff necklines are low, the shorts are short, and
the cowgirl boots are high. Everyone dines on gobs of barbecued pork piled high
on plates and washes it down with large sodas and hard whiskey. It’s everything
Michael Bloomberg, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and
hardline feminists hold in contempt in one place.
In this sort of environment, the average hypersensitive
college student would explode from insufficient trigger warnings. (Although in
their defense, they are surrounded by literal triggers.)
Meanwhile, the press who will be covering Hillary Clinton
in the coming cycle enjoyed an off-the-record dinner with her campaign staff at
the home of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta in New York City. The
host, formerly the chairman of the Center for American Progress, cooked pasta
with walnut sauce. Separately, “On Friday night, Clinton strategist Joel
Benenson will hold a similar dinner with reporters, correspondents and even
some television anchors at his apartment in New York.”
The candidate who lives and works in Washington and New
York will be covered by reporters who live and work in Washington and New York.
The culture — the dress, the language, and the viewpoints expressed in the
office of the nascent Hillary Clinton campaign in Brooklyn Heights — is going
to be similar to the one in the New York Times Building, the NBC News offices,
or the CNN New York Bureau a few miles away.
Hillary Clinton did not address the NRA Convention, an
unsurprising absence for a woman whose past record is thoroughly
pro-gun-control. She supported banning “assault weapons,” supported gun-owner
licensing and gun registration, opposed legislation prohibiting the
confiscation of firearms during emergencies, and opposed legislation
prohibiting lawsuits seeking to hold the firearm industry financially liable
for harm caused by criminals who use guns.
For what it’s worth, if Hillary had been willing to speak
to the NRA, that might have forced its members to briefly reconsider their deep
antipathy to her. It would have been a remarkable bit of genuine diplomacy, and
her experience might have forced her to reevaluate her belief that “we’ve got
to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a
gun anywhere, anytime.”
In past comments, Hillary has painted a dark portrait of
America’s gun owners, suggesting they’re so prone to violence, they’re willing
to shoot other people for the tiniest slights imaginable: “At the rate we’re
going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed,
fully validated, in settings where [one] could be in a movie theater, and they
don’t like someone chewing gum loudly or talking on their cell phone and decide
they have the perfect right to defend themselves against the gum chewer or cell
phone user by shooting.”
If you think of a person as having such a violent temper
that they would shoot someone over chewing gum, would you trust them with
access to a kitchen knife? A chainsaw? A baseball bat? Would you trust them
with the right to vote?
Hillary’s dire vision of a society beset by quick-drawing
cell-phone-etiquette enforcers hasn’t come to pass. Crime has declined as gun
sales have increased. Hillary’s low, paranoid opinion of America’s gun owners
indicates she doesn’t really know any of them. She lives in a mobile bubble of
luxury and privilege, and peers out in fear at the Americans who gather in
Tennessee shooting ranges, hunting grounds, and bars, as if observing a strange
alien species.
Unfortunately, a significant number of people who cover
presidential races are comfortable in her bubble, too.
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