Musings on the pastime of politics with blinders

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

My office phone rang and rang Sunday. The voice mail quickly filled up. Same with the e-mail.

I had written a piece raising the question of why women voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California, given his alleged history of manhandling women.

I compared him to Bill Clinton. I said in the column that unlike Schwarzenegger's accusers, the women Clinton hit on had welcomed his advances.

When I wrote that, I was thinking of Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers.

The callers and e-mailers had other names in mind. Paula Jones. Kathleen Willey. Juanita Broaddrick. Women who said they didn't want Clinton's advances.

In my haste to make an argument regarding Schwarzenegger - my right as a columnist charged with expressing opinion - I overlooked them.

That said, what I don't get, and never will get, is the other, and most singular, part of the calls.

I'm talking about the tirade of those who believed that my failure to name the other women exposed some leftie bias on my part, and proved beyond a doubt that I am a card-carrying member of the mainstream liberal media conspiracy that tried unsuccessfully to stop Schwarzenegger.

Here's a sample of the tirade.

"You are a reprehensible ideologue."

"You're an obvious hypocrite."

"Face it, Mary Jo. You've been Clintonized."

"I don't know where I would get my daily laughs if it weren't for all you commie-loving lefties."

There was another message in the words.

I could hear it in the voices, the tenor of the sentences. My experience with this column, and these responses, is typical of the way we Americans conduct our politics these days. Balls fly from either hard left or hard right. Too many of us have lost all sense of the middle. We're past the stage of speaking in normal tones. We're into shouting now.

Have you tuned into talk radio lately? Or cable TV? You barely have to push the volume control. It's set so high from the start. And the only stories that get covered seem to be the ones with the highest confrontation quotient. That's the way the programs are set up from the start.

Then there's the Internet, the wonderful Web that was supposed to inform and liberate us. It has become instead a machine capable of spreading a lie like wildfire. People, reading the lie, swallow it whole. Meanwhile, a sea of newspaper ink, more often the product of solid shoe-leather reporting, is dismissed as malevolent fantasy.

This is not only the province of the far right. The right is just better at it.

Those who said women should have soundly criticized Clinton for his conduct, who said that he should be held to the same standard as Schwarzenegger, were correct. I would argue that Clinton has been judged. Nothing speaks louder than impeachment, although that point never satisfies the rabid Clinton haters.

Some of them come across as truly scary.

Newspapers, cable news, talk radio and the Internet are all part of how we talk to each other about how we want to govern ourselves. We are supposed to do it by compromise. But increasingly, the tenor is not about compromise. It's about taking no prisoners.

We shout into the microphone, call names across cyberspace.

No wonder Europeans are increasingly afraid of us.

This isn't democracy. It's cacophony.

You want to call me a liberal? Go ahead, although if you think that what I wrote about Clinton was intended to give him a pass on his sexual misconduct, you're seriously mistaken.

Doesn't it seem strange to you that some of the same conservatives who couldn't forgive Clinton readily embraced Schwarzenegger?

Is that question somehow less valid than wondering why Schwarzenegger's critics were silent about Clinton?

Or am I just one of those goofy lefties, mouthing off again?

- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 226-3402.

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