We’ve noted that the Chronicle occasionally has problems with its letter page.
However, one problem we’ve never noted before is the newspaper’s editorial page editor taking space on the editorial page to contest a letter written by a political partisan and published in the same day’s letters section.
That’s just what happened on Saturday, when the newspaper published a letter from Texas Republican Party Chair Tina Benkiser, “Dean’s a gift to Republicans,” a response to an op-ed by an Austin political partisan that ran over a week ago (an op-ed that was not matched by any critical comment from the Chron editorial board the day it ran). Benkiser’s letter, however, was countered by an “editorial journal” from James Howard Gibbons that attempted to counter Benkiser.
Gibbons is interim editorial page editor, and if he wants to take up space by personally countering a political party chair who took the time to write his newspaper instead of soliciting a response from the other party’s state chair, that’s certainly his prerogative. It strikes me as poor editorial judgment, however.
Substantively, he betrays quite a bit of what is wrong with the insular members of the Chronicle editorial board, and why he’d be wise to implement some of the suggestions we offered at the beginning of 2005.
For starters, there’s this:
I can’t resist pointing out that Dean’s politics are to a large degree shared by almost half the electorate, a population considerably larger than that of the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The editorial page editor of a major daily should have resisted using his editorial authority to debate Howard Dean’s selection as chairman of the Democratic National Comittee with the state Republican chair. Since he did so, though, I can’t resist pointing out that Howard Dean could not even secure the nomination of his own party, which soundly rejected him and decided John Kerry was the most “electable” candidate they had! Think about that in light of what Gibbons just wrote.
There’s more:
Apart from the particulars of the chairman’s argument, her letter took me back to 1980, when I felt much the same about what I took to be Ronald Reagan’s vulnerability to Democratic attack.
Wrong then, wrong now. Maybe Gibbons should be more cautious about committing these admissions to paper and the internet! He continues:
Reagan owed his support less to his policies than to the apparently guileless sincerity with which he presented them.
Liberals decided to try and create a myth about the time of Ronald Reagan’s death that Reagan’s popularity was solely an artifact of his “optimism,” not his policies. In reality, his policies and his optimism helped him forge winning coalitions on policy by pulling in moderate Democrats, many of whom eventually migrated to the Republican party, helping to explain the party’s position today.
There’s more:
It’s possible that many Democratic primary voters preferred Dean to Sen. John Kerry, but mistakenly feared Dean’s bluntness would alienate independent voters needed to win the White House.
Didn’t he say above that Dean’s views represent a near-majority of voters? But now he says that Dean would have alienated independent voters needed to win a majority? It’s so confusing trying to follow the reasoning of these Chron editorials “in their ideal state.”
Gibbons continues:
Dean is a proven grass-roots organizer and fund-raiser the keys to party success.
Dean’s primary “organization” consisted of taking youthful manpower and seemingly alienating voters who actually lived where voting took place. He was successful at raising petty cash on the internet, but his supporters tend to forget that he mismanaged that cash badly. That may not be the best argument in favor of giving him more political money to manage!
Finally, there’s this whopper:
Since his ascendancy, Dean’s remarks have been comprehensible and modulated, suggesting that his hoarse scream into a microphone in Iowa was an aberration and not a predictor of GOP joy.
As Benkiser pointed out in her letter, Dean’s remark about hating Republicans doesn’t seem particularly temperate, except perhaps in the minds of Chron editorial idealists who should have exercised some discretion and not run this “editorial journal.” And in any case, Republicans are salivating more at the thought of Dean’s beliefs than his screaming gaffe.
Currently, the Chronicle is running radio spots that tout the newspaper as a forum for new ideas and debate. As we’ve noted before, the editorial page’s “Another Voice” section rarely is a source of new ideas. If the editors are going to take shots at published letters with views contrary to their own, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would regard that newspaper as interested in ideas or debate. Then again, Benkiser must be secretly pleased that Gibbons would run such a sloppy, poorly reasoned response. Surely the Democratic Party of Texas, however, could have come up with a more suitable response. The newspaper should have solicited one.
