Lance Mannion on political journalism

Sports journalism treats games as if they’re matters of life and death.  Political journalism treats matters of life and death as if they’re all part of a game.

via Lance Mannion.

Am I smart enough to criticize President Obama?

Lance Mannion, an astute and interesting long-time blogger, wrote recently that he has no standing to criticize President Barack Obama because Obama is so much smarter than he is.   Therefore he is going to be silent about the President’s policies and restrict his criticism and ridicule to obviously ignorant right-wingers.

Well, I don’t think I’m as smart as Obama, either.  As far as that goes, I think the vast majority of Presidents during my adult lifetime were smarter than me.   President Richard Nixon, in my opinion, was the smartest of all, both in being well-read and in political astuteness, but that doesn’t put him above criticism.

I think the answer to this was given by the philosopher John Dewey in his defense of democracy.   The average voter is not capable of making presidential decisions, but the voter is capable of knowing how those decisions turned out.  In the same way, Dewey said, he himself was not capable of making his own shoes, but he was capable of knowing whether his shoes fit or not.

I don’t have a plan that will guarantee peace and prosperity for all.

But I don’t see that I’m obligated to come up with such a plan in order to have the standing to oppose perpetual war, presidential death warrants, preventive detention, universal surveillance, bank bailouts, impunity for financial fraud, proposals to cut back Social Security and corporate trade agreements that override national sovereignty.

The first step in making things better is to stop doing things that make them worse.  You don’t have to be a genius to understand that.