Losing Control?

A Financial Times article on the redoubtable Glenn Beck, starts with the statement that the White House "lost control of the healthcare debate in August," a meme that reflects the conventional wisdom inside the beltway and repeated by most (but not all) national news pundits.


The article looks to the Glenn Beck phenomenon -- rising viewer numbers as national advertisers separate themselves from his incendiary attack on Obama et al -- as a learning opportunity. But what is learned?


First of all, control is in the mind of the pundit. The corollary is that control, outside the pundit's mind, does not correlate to the loudest voices and heat from a partisan crowd.


Glenn Beck has learned that incendiary language can deliver an audience big enough to provide a substantial income to him. Rush Limbaugh is a role model in this regard. I have a family acquaintance who has been a social friend of Rush's for some years. In social situations his political opinions are well hidden, or far short of his caffeine- and whatever-driven on-air rants. Perhaps Glenn has a private life, as well.


Being a talk show host is a job. If your goal is to build an audience base that delivers revenue, then you're certainly incented to keep pushing the language to keep pushing the audience. And Glenn is just doing his job.


Now, about that audience. After decades of scientific polling, through every vagary of historical upheaval, it is clear that are large groups, on both ends of our political spectrum, who are so identified with that viewpoint that reality that they are not likely to change, no matter what the opposing argument or candidate. However, those groups do not share the same values.


To make a gross but useful generalization, the right is less open to intellectual arguments than the left. Glenn Beck has found that his audience responds to emotional stimuli -- fear, anger, frustration -- and he feeds that emotional rush. But this is not the same as controlling the argument -- unless his audience controls the apparatus of government. And they don't.


Pundits, no less than Glenn, live in the present. "Today is the end of history. Political reality is the only reality. And no one will ever hold me account for what I said yesterday, or last week."


Now, that's control.