# Posted 2:43 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

VIRGINIA WILL VOTE FOR KERRY: Well, maybe not. But Charlottesville is money in the bank for the Senator from Massachusetts.

I expected to have a quiet first morning in my new office. Instead, hundreds of visitors descended on the Miller Center for a presentation by Hendrik Hertzberg, the political voice of The New Yorker and former speechwriter for President Carter.

I had high expectations for the event. This may be a college town, but I figured there would at least be some conservative Democrats in the audience willing to ask Hertzberg some tough questions. Oh, how wrong I was.

If not for its colonial architecture, I might have mistaken the lecture hall for a Greenwich Village coffee shop. Hertzberg was preaching to the choir.

I began to suspect that I was in for trouble when the woman sitting next to me asked about the subject of my dissertation and then followed up by asking whether there is so much anti-Americanism in the world because of American efforts to promote democracy abroad. Wanting to make a good impression on the citizens of my new hometown, I told her that when America really promotes democracy abroad and doesn't just talk about it, the world respects us more.

The subject of Hertzberg's prepared remarks was the conservative bias in the United States Constitution. Instead of one government, we have three: House, Senate and presidency. Things only get done when all of them agree. That is why, Hertzberg said, we don't have national healthcare even though most people want it and every other modern democracy has it.

Now, I'm more than willing to agree that the Founders designed the Constitution to make our government resistant to change. But I'm not sure how much that has to do with today's healthcare debate.

During the Q&A, Hertzberg complained quite a bit about the extremism of the modern Republican party as well as the GOP's unprecedented control of the House, Senate and executive branch. Hertzberg says nothing is going to change because gerrymandered districts prevent any sort of turnover in the House while small states, most of them red, dominate the Senate. He said we should expect forty years of GOP dominance on the Hill, the same way we once had forty years of Democratic control. (Hertzberg didn't go into how the Democrats lost control if the system is so paralyzed.)

But if conservatives control all three of the "governments" set up by the Constitution, how can Hertzberg complain that the constitutional division of powers is what stands in the way of reform? What it really comes down to is that the Republicans have done a lot better at the polls since 1994. And as Hertzberg himself pointed out, moderate Democrats will probably stand in the way of dramatic reforms even if their party retakes control of the House and Senate.

The question that Hertzberg and his audience seemed unwilling to ask themselves was why American voters won't hand their government over to a solid majority of liberal Democrats. If someone did ask that question, I'm guessing that Hertzberg would've attributed the GOP's success to its vicious and unscrupulous lies. In his comments about Kerry's nuanced position on Iraq, Hertzberg said that one of Kerry's main shortcomings as a candidate is his "surplus of intellectual honesty."

The one interesting question the audience had for Hertzberg was whether activist websites and weblogs are right when they say that the "MSM", or mainstream media, have totally failed to expose the truth about Republican lies. Hertzberg agreed. Look at the Swift Boat controversy, he said. The media's prentensions of objectivity lead it to treat all politics in a he said-she said manner, thus giving unwarranted legitimacy to the most outrageous claims.

I wonder what newspapers Hertzberg has been reading. Certainly not the NYT or LAT or even the WaPo. As Jonathan Last has pointed out, all of the major media outlets, both print and broadcast, ignored the Swift Vets' story until Kerry himself counterrattacked. Then they provided coverage sympathetic to Kerry. Moreover, the "MSM" stills seems consitutionally unable to provide any reasonable coverage of Kerry's fantasies about spending Christmas Eve in Cambodia.

Hertzberg's comments about the MSM were enlightening, however, in the sense that they explain how the media can be so biased: because it absolutely refuses to admit even to itself -- or especially to itself -- how biased it is. [In retrospect, that comment is unfair to Hertzberg. He wasn't particularly emphatic about this point. But the journalists I spoke to at the RNC were. -ed.]

During the Q&A, I was tempted to ask a question myself, if only to disrupt the left-wing lovefest going on around me. But I'm having dinner with Hertzberg tonight, so I'm going to save my questions for then.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum describes my discussion of the media and the Swift Vets as "wildly misleading". Response forthcoming.

UPDATE: I had very nice dinner with Mr. Hertzberg, not to mention all of the other intelligent and inquisitive guests at the home of Mr. & Mrs. G. Over coffee, I had my chance to speak out. I can't say much about it, both because this was a private dinner and because the adrenaline rush shut down my memory.

What I can say is that Mr. Hertzberg listened to my improvised thoughts with greater care and greater patience than they might have deserved. I think that the other guests must have sensed my excitment at the prospect of going head-to-head with such a prominent individual. Thus, they graciously let me elaborate on my thoughts even though they themselves clearly had plenty to contribute to the discussion.

In the end, I think that Mr. Hertzberg had the better of the argument. However, the whole affair resulted in some excellent publicity for OxBlog, which Mr. Hertzberg said he would read.

(Rik, if you're reading, my apologies for throwing so many elbows your way at the beginning of this post. It wasn't my best work. If you click here and here, I think you'll see that OxBlog prefers analysis and evidence to rhetorical barbs.)
(1) opinions -- Add your opinion