What, in today’s political culture, is a “centrist”? Old-fashioned political nerds define it by support for legislation and policy proposals. If you love really big tax cuts and favor abolishing several Cabinet departments, you’re not a centrist. If you want to “defund the police” and “end fossil fuels,” you’re also not a centrist.
This is one of those matters of political categorization that our most prestigious newspapers mangle on a regular basis. Liberal editors and reporters have an annoying tendency to define the center as the precise location where they stand on the ideological spectrum.
Case in point: The New York Times placed this fraudulent headline at the top of its front page on Sunday: “On Philosophy, Biden Cabinet Leans Centrist.” This is simply preposterous.
Reporters Michael Shear and Michael Crowley display their delusion (or their attempt to confuse the public) in their lede: “His economic and environment teams are a little left of center. His foreign policy picks fall squarely in the Democratic Party’s mainstream. His top White House aides are Washington veterans.”
Being a “Washington veteran” does not define your ideology. Sen. Ed Markey has 44 years of service in Congress. He also has an American Conservative Union Foundation lifetime rating of 3%. Being in the “Democratic mainstream” is a very different measure than being in the bipartisan mainstream, where you might define a centrist. Someone with a lifetime ACU rating of 44%, such as Sen. Susan Collins, is a centrist.
The Times wants to have it both ways. It insists Biden’s “initial wave of personnel choices is a familiar, pragmatic and largely centrist one.” Two paragraphs later, it touts the choices for having “a new sense of urgency about climate change.” So, in the elastic definitions of The Times, you can have the “urgency” to end fossil fuels and be “largely centrist” at the same time.
The story brings in Varshini Prakash of the radical Sunrise Movement — the organization that protested against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein as being some kind of horrid, petroleum-entranced centrists who are dooming the children to planetary death by failing to back the Green New Deal. Prakash praised Biden’s environmental picks as a “departure from the leave-it-to-the-markets way of thinking” on climate.
You can tell the Sunrise Movement is extremist because The Times defines it as a “liberal group focused on climate change.”
What this betrays is that reporters sound a lot like Democratic politicians trying to placate moderate or nonideological voters with soothing sounds about centrism, and placate the leftist Democratic base with their warm praise for Biden’s “urgency.” Reporters praise Biden as “boring” in manner and “ambitious” in agenda.
Finally, the Times reporters declare, “(T)here is no one yet in Mr. Biden’s cabinet carrying the torch for the policies that he campaigned against during the primaries: free college for everyone, a costly Green New Deal, an anti-Wall Street agenda, universal health care and steep increases in the minimum wage.”
How can they forget the incoming vice president? Do they think she’s not in the Cabinet? Kamala Harris signed on to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ socialist “Medicare for All” health care Senate bill and was an early Sanders ally on raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She proposed the Climate Equity Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and backed Sen. Brian Schatz’s Debt-Free College Act.
The New York Times isn’t committing journalism with articles like this. It is engaged in political spin, trying to put a spoonful of centrist sugar on the national palate to help the socialist medicine go down.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
Anytime a liberal says a person is a “Centrist”, that so called “Centrist” is a communist.
To a cross-eyed Democrat “Centrist” means you don’t aim at the head or the legs but shoot your country in the guts for a slow death in creeping socialism or aim at the heart for a quick kill..
Centrists mean they are NOT FULLY Radically marxist..
Being a Democrat centrist means facing whichever way the political wind is blowing as judged by the compliant media and surrounding sycophants disregarding the actual sentiment of the populace at large. Once there was a definite position held by Democrats which has now degenerated into the populism of winning elections and maintaining power at all costs.
Joe Biden loudly and proudly proclaims that his administration’s cabinet will be the most “diverse” of any administration in our nation’s history. This so-called diversity is superficially based on identity politics, political correctness, and devotion to leftist causes like critical race theory and climate change. Unfortunately, Biden’s cabinet diversity has less to do with a candidate’s experience, competence, or the ability to impartially represent the interest of the American people. If Biden becomes president, we can expect at least four years of governance that will damage our economy, lower our standard of living, impose burdensome taxes on the middle class, exacerbate social instability, embolden our foreign adversaries, and make the world a more dangerous place.
AND like with too damn many colleges and unis, THEIR IDEA of diversity is ONLY In skin tone, race/gender/sex, and NEVER POLITICAL outlook….
Who cares?
He lost the election, has now only to wonder what the Chinese Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping thinks of him and whether he will still sign son Hunter’s checks.
He lost the election?? Not according to practically the entire media establishment (other than news max and one news now) and all the traitorous judges, along with all the RINOS and marxists in congress…..
EVERY DAMN One of them has said he won, he’s our new president.. AND I don’t see A SINGLE THING changing that.