# Posted 1:16 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

SPEAKING OF BIRKENSTOCK LIBERALS...Kevin Drum writes in [via e-mail] that

I actually thought "Birkenstock liberal" was a perfect term.  In two words it brought forth a whole slew of connotations and describes perfectly a certain kind of person.  I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Yet as RO points out, Dean himself has rejected the phrase "Birkenstock liberal" as an unfair cliche that the media relies on to marginalize him. RO writes that

Howard Dean used the phrase "Birkenstock liberals" during the Portland
stop during the "Sleepless Summer" [tour].

The Portland stop was two days before the New York stop that Jodi Wilgoren was reporting on.

Dean used the phrase as an example of something the press had been calling supporters of his campaign. I believe this makes the use of the phrase by Jodi Wilgoren all the more outrageous and seriously moots Kevin Drum's disagreement with your assessment.

Kevin seemed to believe it was nothing more than an "evocative" turn of phrase, in fact it would appear to me an example of a reporter using a loaded term she or he knew was objectionable to the subject of his or her article for no more reason than to poke a sharp stick at the subject and see what would happen.

At any rate, the audio from Portland still seems to be available in
the list at the bottomg of the main www.deanforamerica.com page. Dean may
have used the phrase in Falls Church the day before that, indeed he may
have been using it for some time before I became aware of it, but he
was definitely using it before Jodi Wilgoren used it to "review" the
Bryant Park speech.

Responding from the right, the ever-insouciant EP observes that

Please inform your readers, that the NYT not withstanding, there are many people who wear Birkenstocks who are not only not liberal, but rabidly conservative.  I am one such myself.  Not only that, but I lived in Vermont, yes Vermont, for many years before coming to my senses and moving to Florida...[D]uring those many years, I wore these extremely comfortable shoes (the sandal variety -- easily the most telltale politically and even occasionally with rag socks)  knowing full well that I was taken for one of 'them' even though I knew I was just funning them.

At risk of setting myself for a "yo-mama" joke, I'll add that my own mother wears Birkenstocks and is a centrist Democrat who voted for Giuliani and against Bloomberg.

On a more serious note, Rabbi MB -- a supporter of Howard Dean -- writes that

I think you identified an important factor in what drives media bias and why even institutions that are typed as liberal are often damaging to liberal and progressive causes.  To the jaded NYT, any one who claims to speak for the people or involve them in Democracy is playing the political game.  The more earnest they are, the more they must be knocked down. 

The elitist bias of a paper like the NYT not only leads to the dismissive tone that marked Wilgoren's article, but also makes the paper less likely to do the journalism necessary to document the abuses of the system perpetrated by some conservatives or Republicans.  Its only newsworthy when a  Republican crosses the stereotype and cares about social issues or when a Democrat can be exposed as a fraud or irrelevant. 

Unfortunately other mainstream news sources are not interested in seeing the nuanced picture you present and take every opportunity to bash "liberal bias" as a purely ideological phenomenon. All of us -- conservative, progressive, libertarian, or liberal -- with a serious commitment to resolving iddues and revitalizing the democratic process are done a disservice by elitism and media bias.

In contrast, Kevin Drum [same e-mail] asks

You completely lost me with the Julius Caesar stuff.  How did you draw all those conclusions from a simple paragraph saying that Dean's crowds were remarkably high this early in the campaign?  The "elitist liberal intelligentsia distrusts the common man"?  Isn't that a bit of a stretch from a fairly unexceptionable paragraph?
 
Anyway, I'm not trying to hammer you.  I'm just curious why you reacted so strongly to an article that seemed fairly ordinary to me.

Kevin is right to ask that sort of question. Wilgoren's article alone is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate an anti-populist bias in the mainstream media. I reacted so strongly because, in the course of my research, I have come into contact with a significant body of scholarship that assaults the mainstream "liberal" media for its anti-populist/anti-radical bias.

Thus, I was not deriving a conceptual framework from a single NYT article. Rather, I was applying a pre-existing conceptual framework to it. In that light, I think Wilgoren's word choices are extremely significant.

(For those interested in further reading, the classic work on this subject is Todd Gitlin's The Whole Word is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left)

Last but not least, a factual correction: Both Kevin Drum and VC -- an editor at a major metropolitan daily -- point that correspondents do not write the headlines for their own articles. As VC incisively observes,

One should not attribute a headline, bad or good, to the reporter who writes the story under the headline, since she almost certainly had nothing to do with
it and very likely never even saw the headline until, like you, she picked up a
paper the morning it was published.

Point taken. That's all for now, but if you're looking for more, surf on over to the Sarcastic Southerner for more on Dean.

UPDATE: Aziz over at Dean2004 (the unofficial Dean blog) is glad to have a "righty" on his side. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion