Afternoon drive time is when I usually listen to All Things Considered on NPR, or a bit of Hannity if I can stand it. (If I can’t stand either, lately I’ve been going to a CD of tracks from Cowboy Bebop — but that’s another matter.) Today, ATC had a truly amazing exchange:
NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks to Joy-Ann Reid, national correspondent for MSNBC and author of Fracture, and Mary Kate Cary, former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and columnist for U.S. News & World Report, about the political news of the week.
As you can see from the names, NPR was trying to do the fair and balanced thing while discussing the State of the Union address and the latest GOP debate.
It got off to an interesting start:
SHAPIRO: And so is there any hope left for the establishment Republicans to get their guy get in there or do they just have to come to grips with the fact that this is going to be a race in which Trump and Cruz and the other people on what's considered the fringe of the party are going to seize the day?
CARY: Well, for most of the establishment Republicans I've been talking to, I think step one right now is bargain with God. Start begging.
emphasis added
The whole interview is worth listening to, but I was especially struck by this exchange.
REID: Well, I think that gets to the kernel of one of the many ironies of the situation that the establishment of the Republican Party finds itself in because right - so Chris Christie is a part of that establishment wing, but he speaks about the president in such a degrading way as if the president is a child and not the commander in chief of the United States - such a disrespectful way. That's suborned the kind of rage and the kind of paranoia, frankly, that you see among the base of the Republican Party. The problem for the establishment is that they've lost control of it. They suborned things quietly like birtherism. They winked and nodded at ideas like death panels. They have sort of allowed this kind of fury and paranoia to help them win midterm elections, but it's now out of control. So they've both locked themselves out of even the possibility of reaching out, particularly to African-American voters, who read the entire Republican Party - not just Donald Trump, but all of it, every single part of it - as being essentially sowing hatred of the president based at least in part on race. And that bleeds over to Hispanics, it bleeds over to Asian-Americans. It creates a vie [vibe?] that the Republican Party can't fix, and Donald Trump is just better at them at exploiting it.
SHAPIRO: Mary Kate, you're shaking your head. You're looking quizzical.
CARY: Wait, wait. (Laughter). I think, Joy, there are certainly elements of what you're saying that are true, but it seems to me that you're painting with a very broad brush. And there are plenty of good Republicans in the world who are not dealing in hatred and vitriol and racism. And I do think over the last few years when we have these candidates who say these crazy things - the birtherism, you know, things like that that you pointed out - there are people who stand up and say, I disavow that, I don't agree with that.
SHAPIRO: But unfortunately, those people don't seem able to speak for the party in the primary right now - unfortunately for them, unfortunately for the establishment Republicans.
emphasis added
It doesn’t end as well, unfortunately, as Shapiro lets Cary end with the lie that Obama’s difficulty in getting Republicans to work with him was his fault for being mean to them the first couple of years, and not the GOP determination to practice total obstruction from day one, as Reid explained.
Still, it’s refreshing to hear something on NPR that cuts through the usual media narrative.