Same Old, Same Old Left-Right Debates on TV Getting Old

President Obama's State of the Union speech was excellent, in terms of delivery and charisma. And the First Lady was simply stunning, even radiant. I don't know if Mr. Obama will ever top his victory speech the night of the Iowa caucus, which was a transcendent moment in American history.

But the analysis on TV here in the US has been uniformly bad or at best very mediocre. Everything is positioned in the false Left-Right light, leaving those of us in the libertarian segment (admittedly feeling very small these days) out in the cold.

Even Charlie Rose was disappointing, having a 5-person roundtable consisting of 4 leftwingers and one supposedly conservative pundit (who, BTW, writes it seems to increasingly impress the Beltway cocktail party set). It's obvious most of these folks on all these shows grew up believing the New Deal hype and accept it as religion.

And it would be so -- well, refreshing -- to have seen Thomas Donlan or even better Jim Grant frequent these roundtables. Perhaps Mr. Donlan will address the State of the Union address in the upcoming Barron's this weekend.

In the meantime, Holman Jenkins writes something in The Wall Street Journal popping out:

His will be a fascinating presidency to watch, not least because of his inexperience, his intellectual agility, and the crisis in which he finds himself. But his presidency will get really interesting in a year or two, or six months -- whenever he finally realizes that everything he thought he wanted to do is irrelevant. He'll then have to adapt an agenda for the world as it is, in which many childish things no longer have a place.

And, by the way, he kids himself if he believes he will be allowed, like FDR, to preside over a depression without being politically blamed for it. The public is different now -- the world is different -- and he will own the "Obama depression" sooner than he thinks.

Wonder column. Read the entire thing. But I wonder if Jenkins is wrong in that last paragraph.

Comments

[Jason]

All is not lost! I understand that www.mises.org the Austro-Libertarian website is getting more hits than they ever have. I'm hoping that that talk-show radio will produce a libertarian equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. If that happens, we'll be on our way...

[CONTROLLED GREED.com]

Jason: That's good news. I'm a big fan of Mises.org and regular reader of LRC. But I was specifically talking about these news roundtables on TV. You'd think, just for a change, they'd have at least one participant who didn't believe the New Deal hype.

[Alex]

Even CNBC, where viewers have a financial incentive to demand high quality reporting, fills the air with opinionated journalists. Even the rejoinders to New Deal - Great Society philosophies have been presented in axiomatic fashion. Its amazing that the downturn apparently encourages histrionic media rather than more precise and technical reporting. Thank goodness for the Financial Times.

[John]

Alex: True, just as cable news is entertainment TV presented as news, CNBC is often entertainment TV presented as business news.

I love the FT. But I have to say that not too long ago an FT columnist was on CNBC repeating as fact one of history's great lies: that Hoover was a free marketer who did nothing and FDR came in with the New Deal to save us all. It was left to Charles Gasparino (sp?) of CNBC to set her straight and refer her to Amity Shlaes excellent book on the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man."