Bursting the bubble

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You heard about his dinner with conservatives and his meeting with "liberals"*, but, just as much, one of the more intriguing meetings Obama has had recently was with Lee Hamilton and a group of foreign policy experts, mostly on the Middle East and South Asia, who work outside "the presidential bubble that is rapidly closing around him," as Laura Rozen put it.

It is, needless to say, astonishingly difficult for a president to avoid being trapped in the bubble, but it does seem that Obama is determined to try. Which is extremely promising.

* I use scare quotes because the guest list was not all that liberal. While some of the attendees are certainly on the left (Dionne, Rich, Maddow, Robinson, Martin), a couple of them are non-liberal Beltway reporters (Brownstein, Seib), and one of them isn't liberal at all (Sullivan, a self-professed conservative, however much some of his views may be characterized as liberal and however pro-Obama he may be). (And one of them is, to me, a superfluous, annoying pseudo-liberal (Dowd).)

Krugman, who was invited but didn't attend, is certainly one of the mainstream media's more progressive figures, but what strikes me, comparing the conservative dinner and the liberal meeting, is that, despite the emergence of figures like Maddow and Olbermann, not to mention Stewart and Colbert, there are really no liberal-progressive equivalents to the likes of Kristol, Brooks, Will, and Krauthammer, that is, prominent pundits both in print and on TV. Krugman doesn't nearly have their wide exposure on TV, and neither does Dionne or Rich (neither of whom, in any event, is as determinedly partisan as their conservative counterparts, with Dionne more of a centrist liberal and Rich often as critical of the Democrats as he is of the Republicans).

Part of the reason is certainly Fox News, which provides a platform for right-wing pundits, and which has no left-wing equivalent, but I also think that part of it is the mainstream media's rightward tilt, its susceptibility to conservative messaging and propaganda (not least with respect to alleged liberal bias), its overcompensatory efforts at "balance." I tend to like the pundits at TNR a great deal -- Scheiber, Crowley, Cottle, Judis, Fairbanks, Zengerle, Orr, et al. -- but they don't have the right's broad media exposure either.