January 29, 2007 -- 12:40 PM EST // //
DAVID BRODER: MCCAIN GOOD, HILLARY BAD. WHO CARES ABOUT THEIR ACTUAL POSITIONS?
Oh, man -- you couldn't ask for a more perfect demonstration of the Beltway press' addiction to theatrics over substance than this.
In his latest column, the Washington Post's David Broder hammers Hillary Clinton for her performance at last week's Senate hearing on the nomination of General Petraeus. He faults Hillary for not asking any questions, while McCain asked a grand total of 14 of them, writing:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York used her time to make a speech about Iraq policy and did not ask a single question of the man who will be leading the military campaign...McCain asked Petraeus 14 questions, ranging from the political situation in Iraq to the morale of the troops to the timeline for the planned "surge." He ran out of time before he ran out of questions -- quite a contrast to Clinton....
This month Clinton began her presidential campaign, as she did her first race for the Senate in New York, by saying that she wanted to do a lot of listening. She sure wasn't listening to Gen. Petraeus. She wasn't even asking.
Broder goes on and on like this, slamming Clinton's performance as "posturing" and as (of course) "partisan." His point, obviously, was that Clinton was merely indulging in political grandstanding -- in contrast to McCain, who was so genuinely focused on policy issues that he asked more questions of Petraeus than he had time for. In other words, Hillary bad, McCain good.
But here's what's funny: There isn't a single word in Broder's column devoted to analyzing the actual content of the positions that Clinton and McCain articulated. Making this even more remarkable, it seems very clear from the available evidence -- that is, what Broder himself has written in the past -- that his own position on Iraq has much more in common with Clinton's views as expressed at the hearing than with McCain's. In other words, Broder basically agrees far more with Hillary.
Don't believe it? I went back and read another Broder column, this one from January 18, and compared it to Hillary's speech at the hearing (via Nexis). Broder agrees with Hillary that the rhetoric being directed by the White House and its allies at opponents of the "surge" is toxic. He agrees with Hillary that it's "fundamentally up to the government in Baghdad" to rein in the violence and come up with a political solution. He agrees with Hillary that the Bush administration's performance has been so bad that Congressional oversight is sorely needed. Yep, on Iraq Broder broadly agrees with Clinton on fundamentally key points.
Meanwhile, it's far from clear whether Broder agrees with McCain in any substantive way at all. As best as I can determine, Broder hasn't endorsed the "surge." And even if he has endorsed it in principle somewhere, he has labeled the current implementation of the increase, which McCain supports, as the "wrong approach."
Yet rather than offering his opinions of the actual substantive positions these two Senators expressed on the most important issue of our time, Broder instead devotes a whole column on the hearing to blasting Hillary -- and comparing her unfavorably with McCain, to boot -- based on nothing more than a few minutes of meaningless theatrics. Come on, now. Can't we do better than this?
Update: Matthew Yglesias adds more on another dimension to all this.