Former Newsweek political reporter Howard Fineman – now at The Huffington Post – appeared on Wednesday as he occasionally does on The Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN 980 Radio in Washington. Kornheiser, a longtime Washington Post sports columnist before becoming an ESPN host, asked about how Ebola and ISIS were playing into the elections.
Fineman decided to unload on former Senator Scott Brown, now running in New Hampshire, as a “test bed of fearmongering among Republican candidates” combining ISIS and Ebola into a “nightmarish ball of fear” to the anti-government crowd in the Granite State.
KORNHEISER: There’s a level of worry in this country now about things that never expected they’d have to deal with in this country. This is not to say that ISIS is coming over here and is going to sit down on the Metro and start chopping heads off. But there is reason to believe if people and fanatical and willing to die, that they would come over here and if we are the enemy in their minds, and start killing them and us. There are elections in about an hour. Are either of these things political issues? Is anybody running against the handling of this?
FINEMAN: Well, increasingly, the Republicans in the last few weeks of the campaign are, either fairly or unfairly they’re seizing on fear in some places, in some races. I tend to look at New Hampshire, where Scott Brown, the guy from Massachusetts, moved across the border, and he’s desperately trying as an immigrant to New Hampshire to try and knock off an incumbent senator, Jeanne Shaheen. He shouldn’t be in the race. She should be clobbering him. It’s only a race because he’s kind of the test bed for fear-mongering among Republican candidates. And yes, first he talked about the border. Remember the border? Nobody even talks about the border anymore, the Mexico-US border.
So first he tried that scene, and that didn’t work too well. But now he’s on both ISIS and Ebola, and he’s rolling it up into one uh, sort of nightmarish ball of fear that he’s trying to sell to New Hampshirites who don’t forget, have that “Live Free or Die” motto and they mostly want to be left alone. They view Massachusetts as a threat, they don’t even want to have anything to do with Massachusetts, even though many of them work there, and I don’t think it’s going to work in New Hampshire, but the fact that it’s a race shows that it’s out there.
KORNHEISER, joking: It’s always good to talk to Howard. It always confirms all of my fears.
Before that attack, Fineman offered a broader Van Jones-style oration on how anti-government folks are missing how important government is on the new threats:
FINEMAN: First I would make the point – a political point, which is we’re in an anti-government mood. We have been for the last many years. Conservatives are always talking about the role of government, always deriding government, always trying to limit government, shutting the government down, cutting the budget, saying that private market and free enterprise is great, is the only answer to everything, and certainly I’m a libertarian at heart myself.
But these are two cases where government is required, and lots of it, and very good, very efficient, and very – as we say in Kentucky about horse racing – you have to be “on the muscle” for this. And I think as a political reporter, I worry that we don’t have the will and the sense of community, let alone the wherewithal to be disciplined about both of these things. That’s how I would put them together.
And I think a whole lot of years of corrosive cynicism about government make it harder right now on both of these fronts.
He added: “A generation ago, Gallup regularly asked the question Do you believe that government officials try to do the right thing all or most of the time? Back when we were kids, 75 percent – three out of four people – said yes, who believe tha they try to do the right thing all or most of the time....but the numbers are about one in four now.”
Fineman did not wonder if all the Woodward-and-Bernstein style (not to mention Edward Snowden-enabling style) of government skepticism in the liberal media is responsible in any way.
PS: In the second hour of his show, Kornheiser brought up the recent slate of obituaries on David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg. Reflexively, Kornheiser brought in “the anti-Red scare, the Joe McCarthy scare. The person who embodies that now, Ted Cruz, who causes me great fear and anxiety.” He found it unfathomable that the Rosenbergs would both be executed, leaving “two small sons” behind, and claimed that the case against the Rosenbergs was “trumped-up testimony at a trumped-up time.” See Ronald Radosh to put that in context.
