Can you imagine John Edwards lecturing someone on marital fidelity? Neither can The Scrapbook. So we were surprised to learn that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who is best known for his inability to let his guests finish a sentence, criticized Fox News anchor Bret Baier for interrupting President Obama during Baier’s White House interview on Wednesday.
Matthews introduced a heavily edited clip and complained that Obama was not given adequate time to talk. “It was hard going—hard for him to get in a sentence, at least a full one.” Matthews said that Obama should demand to know “who brought that character into the Oval Office.”
That would be an odd question since the interview took place in the Blue Room, not to mention the fact that it took place at the White House’s initiative (as Fred Barnes reports on page 10 of this issue). Ah, details.
Is it true, as Matthews and his guests suggested, that Obama did not have time to make his case? A review of the tape—down to the second—shows that Baier’s total talk time was 5 minutes, Obama’s was 18 minutes—much of it spent filibustering to avoid answering Baier’s questions. By comparison, in the Hardball segment in which Matthews criticized Baier, Matthews spoke for 2:51 and his two guests for a total of 2:55.
For a dissenting view of the interview, we suggest the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, who called it “the most revealing and important broadcast interview of Barack Obama ever.” She writes:
It revealed his primary weakness in speaking of health care, which is a tendency to dodge, obfuscate and mislead. He grows testy when challenged. It revealed what the president doesn’t want revealed, which is that he doesn’t want to reveal much about his plan. This furtiveness is not helpful in a time of high public anxiety. At any rate, the interview was what such interviews rarely are, a public service. That it occurred at a high-stakes time, with so much on the line, only made it more electric. . . . Mr. Baier’s first question was whether the president supports the so-called Slaughter rule, alternatively known as “deem and pass,” which would avoid a straight up-or-down House vote on the Senate bill. (Tunku Varadarajan in the Daily Beast cleverly notes that it sounds like “demon pass,” which it does. Maybe that’s the juncture we’re at.) Mr. Obama, in his response, made the usual case for ObamaCare. Mr. Baier pressed him. The president said, “The vote that’s taken in the House will be a vote for health-care reform.” We shouldn’t, he added, concern ourselves with “the procedural issues.” . . . I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn’t worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass.
Also a fan of Baier’s work was Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik, who wrote, “As much credit as I give Obama for taking his healthcare message to Fox News and staying on point, I also praise Baier for being thoroughly prepared and hitting a very difficult tone of being appropriately aggressive without being hectoring or rude. It was a textbook encounter of how the press should engage the executive branch of government. Think of it as the antidote to NBC anchorman Brian Williams’s bow to Obama in his prime-time White House special last year.”
Zurawik put his own cards on the table:
Baier was impressive . . . in pushing the president on the special deals that were cut for such states as Louisiana, Florida and Nebraska—and the near-total lack of transparency about them. . . . Speaking of transparency, I should acknowledge that I personally hope healthcare reform passes. . . . Still as a journalist and media critic, I salute Baier for putting the president to the test and respectfully challenging him on his contradictions and reversals—and the subsequent flaws in the legislation he hopes to see on his desk in a matter of days.
Give this man a show on MSNBC. ♦
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
‘If healthcare reform does pass, it’s hard not to see how this represents anything but a colossal failure of leadership on the part of the GOP. Now, granted, they are the minority party, and party unity has been maintained to perfection—not a single Rep. in either the House or Senate will vote ‘yea.’ But . . . ” (Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider, March 18). ♦
Dining Out on the ‘Red Scare’
Readers of the Washington Post opened their newspapers the other morning to find the obituary for an 89-year-old Chaucer specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Charles Muscatine. “Chaucer scholar,” said the headline, “stood up to Red Scare bullying.”
Oh dear, thought the reader to himself: Another sad story of a selfless patriot trapped in the vise-like grip of McCarthyism, driven from his home and livelihood, reduced to penury and blue-collar labor—perhaps even, at 89, a premature grave—in a decades-long struggle to restore his good name and remind America of its ideals. Poor Professor Muscatine, thought the reader, had probably been a classroom socialist during the Great Depression, or a conscientious objector during World War II—and in the Cold War horrors of the 1950s, must have paid some dreadful price for standing up to “Red Scare bullying.”
Well, accustomed as The Scrapbook has become to the usual heroic treatment in the media of the Hollywood Ten, or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, or any friendly visitor to wartime Hanoi, we were a little startled to learn the actual dimensions of the late professor’s suffering during the Red Scare. It seems that Muscatine, a Yale graduate with a Yale doctorate who had served in the Navy during the war, was required, as a condition of employment at Berkeley in those days, to sign an oath forswearing allegiance to any organization that called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. No one ever suspected or accused Professor Muscatine of such activities, but as a matter of conscience, he—along with 30 other members of the Berkeley faculty—refused to sign the loyalty oath and was dismissed from his post.
The Scrapbook understands the argument that loyalty oaths, a feature of the early Cold War period, were at once ineffective—would a secret traitor have hesitated to swear?—and slightly insulting, a little like contemporary airport security. But they may also be seen as an affirmation of a basic fact about somebody trusted with instruction in a public institution and fundamentally harmless even to the most sensitive conscience. As it happens, Charles Muscatine refused to give Berkeley the assurance it required, and in accordance with the rules, Berkeley fired him.
But here the “Red Scare” narrative grows a little less convincing. Even if we accept the notion, implicit in the Post headline, that concern about Soviet subversion in the Stalin era was a big old “Red Scare”—more comic than serious—and that Berkeley had “bullied” Charles Muscatine by requiring an oath of loyalty to his country, did he suffer in consequence? As it turns out, Professor Muscatine was immediately hired by Wesleyan University to teach Chaucer and, two years later, when a federal appeals court struck down the loyalty oath, was rehired by Berkeley, where he remained until ascending to emeritus status in 1991. In the intervening years he published freely, was a pivotal figure in the Berkeley “Free Speech” movement of the 1960s and radical education reform, and was awarded numerous Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships for research abroad.
So far as The Scrapbook can tell, in the half-century after the “bullying” of the professor during the “Red Scare,” the United States government never interfered with his role as a political activist and university gadfly, blessed his innumerable travels abroad (with taxpayers’ money) to engage in scholarly inquiry—and Charles Muscatine seems never to have ceased dining out on his status as a victim of the McCarthy era who “stood up to Red Scare bullying.”
The kind of martyrdom, in other words, that a Chaucer scholar in most parts of the world would welcome with gratitude. ♦