I am the last one to defend the news media. Their coverage of this cycle’s campaign has been wall-to-wall awful. They don’t cover the issues, which is perhaps not an entirely bad thing, because when they do by accident bump against them in the night, they sure don’t seem to have much understanding of the issues. Instead of covering public policy, the media instead covers trivialities and made-up non-issues, pneumonia and not Trump’s plan to deport 11 million of us.
But while I don’t defend the media in the sense that I think that they are doing at all a good job, I do defend them against the charge that it is their responsibility to define what the campaign is about. To choose just one issue — not at random, but because I think it is the clearly most important issue this cycle — I think it's our side’s responsibility to make some news on this issue.
Clinton could have the story be her immigration policy rather than her pneumonia should she choose to just say what she thinks should be done about the legal status of the 11 million.
Presumably what she wants done is the removal of that illegal status. That was an important goal for our party a year ago, but now that the other party has put the ethnic cleansing of those 11 million on the table, meeting that goal has become a matter of averting an existential threat to the 11 million. Leave them in limbo, and if not this cycle, then next cycle a more competent version of Trump will win, and begin the deportations. This will happen because the other party needs to reverse the demographic tide to survive. Michelle Bachmann is actually right about something (Stop the presses!). The 11 million have to become voters, before the next cycle, if their mass deportation is to be prevented.
But coming out for what Trump has definitively made the only possible outcome that does not end in 11 million of us in detention camps, carries with it huge risks, which is why our side has refused to come out for this solution over the years. Though it is now an existential issue, this has always been the only way consistent with common sense and common decency that the legal limbo we have left the 11 million in ends. But proposing this solution doesn't do us any good electorally, because everybody paying attention already knows we are the clearly less insane and inhumane party on this issue, so we don't do better with these voters. Actually saying what we think should happen only carries the downside of potentially alienating voters who haven't given the issue much attention, and are thereby liable to fall for the other side's strategy of promising a vague solution that will give us security and protect jobs and deny a reward to law-breakers and protect our national identity, all without getting at all concrete on the massive violations of common sense and common decency entailed in any solution that fails to recognize that 11 million of us are already citizens of this country in every way other than the protection of the civil rights and political rights the rest of us enjoy.
That's how our politics devolved into its current state. Both sides do messaging, and avoid actually coming out for anything concrete, because a concrete proposal just provides points of attack for the other side, which can protect itself from counterattack by carefully avoiding itself saying what it wants in any concrete terms. Both sides do ads and plan photo ops to reinforce the subliminals on what their side stands for, without committing to any plan in particular. It's hard to avoid your candidate ever saying something concrete, because tradition does demand that they say things in public on a regular basis, which is why you have spin doctors and other components of a rapid reaction team to deal with such gaffes.
Well, say what you will against Trump, he has at least broken out of that mold. He gaffes on a regular basis, and otherwise fails utterly to do messaging.
Unfortunately, our side has failed to use this opportunity to itself break out of the mold. Saying what we mean, against this particular standard-bearer of the other party, does not run the usual risk of the other side being able to scuttle away to bland generalities while only our side is left vulnerable to attack over the specifics. Trump has committed himself and his party to deporting 11 million of us. We want the spotlight on the specifics of how that works, as opposed to the specifics of how giving the 11 million green cards, works in real life, concrete terms. We can't pin them down to that debate if we stay bland, as we have done. That just lets him get away with his current dance in which he from time to time kinda sorta backs off the categorical immediate deportation of all 11 million, but not really, because he's back to full on ethnic cleansing the next day. He gets to fire up the deplorables, while leaving sane and decent people able to convince themselves that he doesn't mean to do anything worse than continue the current legal limbo for the 11 million.
So that's where we are today, one campaign willing to actually run on a deplorable plan for accomplishing what it really wants to do, while the other sits back and hopes that frankness will cause them to self-destruct without our side committing to any counter-proposal.
Maybe ultimately that approach will work, maybe it won't. Either way, if the conventional approach of not making news is not working very well at the moment, the very last place the blame needs to be cast is on the media. Refuse to give them news to cover, and they will find inanities and distractors to cover. As madness breeds in the sleep of reason, fevered pneumonia coverage breeds in the sleep of real news.