Ezra comments on the
difference in approach to the media by Democrats and Republicans.
People say the media is more viscerally sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. But working in the other direction is the fact that Republicans understand the media much better than Democrats do. Take the reconciliation process. The media is giving blanket coverage to this "controversial" procedure being used by the Democrats. But using reconciliation for a few fixes and tweaks isn't controversial historically, and it's not controversial procedurally. It's only controversial because Republicans are saying it is. Which is good enough, as it turns out. In our political system, if Democrats and Republicans are yelling at each other over something, then for the media, that is, by definition, controversy. This is something Democrats did not understand when George W. Bush was in power.
He then reviews the near total absence of media coverage of a reconciliation debate and vote in May 2003 and goes on to point out some of the reasons.
And why was there nothing? Because Democrats weren't complaining. The tax cuts might have been controversial, but they weren't creative enough to polarize the procedure the Bush administration was using to pass them.
But some of the credit for that has to go to the Bush administration, which took seriously the need to institutionalize reconciliation when they were strong and popular rather than weakened. When Bush came into office, he used reconciliation for his first tax cuts. That was a sharp break with precedent: Reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit, and the process was so poorly suited to the purpose that the Bush administration had to let all of them sunset after 10 years. It was a bizarre, bizarre bill. But by using it for his popular first round of tax cuts, Bush normalized it such that Democrats couldn't really complain when he used it for his much more controversial second round of tax cuts.
