There are at least 3003 reasons why Rachel Maddow is not a “Sick Puppy.”
Because of my preoccupation with football early in life, the first writer I identified with was Jerry Kramer, the Sandpoint, Idaho-native who became an All-Pro guard for Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. I must have read his book, Instant Replay, a half dozen times, or at least until the cover had fallen off.
It says something about the depth of my literary repertoire that I can quote Jerry Kramer much more readily than I can quote Jean-Paul Sartre, or Voltaire, or Dr. Seuss for that matter.
Anyway, one of Jerry’s memorable observations is that the Packers never really lost a game under Lombardi, they only ran out of time every so often when the other team was ahead
on the scoreboard.
I’m going to try to invoke Kramer’s law to explain why I seem to have gotten it so wrong, in a column I wrote the night of Barack Obama’s election victory last November. Here and then I fearlessly predicted that, if nothing else, Obama’s election would change, for the better, “the way we talk to each other.”
Wow, what bullbleep, you’re thinking.
Okay, but hold on a second. I didn’t actually say when Obama’s election would change the way we talk to each other. I’m sure I must have anticipated a decent interval. Heck, it could be 2015, and, if so, I’ll be the first to remind you.
But, seriously, could I have been more wrong?
In the past year, the descent from civility has, if anything, accelerated. To the extent Obama turned the other cheek, he’s now missing that side of his face.
It was certainly beyond my imagination, for example, that people would accuse him of “pulling the plug on grandma,” or “genocide” for pursuing health insurance reform. Nor could I envision that his political enemies would tirelessly question his place of birth, and play to fears that he’s a closet Muslim, prepping the country to be an Islamic Republic.
One reason I could not imagine these things is because I’m still hung up on the apparently antiquated notion that western society has progressed beyond the point where people can invent hateful nonsense out of thin air and propagate it without being ruinously discredited. But, as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh prove day in and day out, just making stuff up is no impediment to landing a set-for-life book contract, or dominating the talk radio universe. Like Wall Street investment bankers, they’ve proven that shameful conduct is no obstacle to riches or influence. For the millions of people who willingly imbibe this toxic brew, it’s as though umbrage, alone, is more important than what’s actually true. The statements may be false but if the emotion looks real, then you’re all set. Ask Glenn Beck.
There don’t seem to be many effective antidotes to this poison but I think Rachel Maddow is one of them.
I should just be straight out with this. I love Rachel Maddow. I know it may seem a little weird that a former football player, marinated in testosterone and Catholicism, would express love for a 36-year-old lesbian. But here’s the deal: she’s funny, she’s smart (the first openly gay American to become a Rhodes Scholar), and she has the rare gift of having both an engaged conscience and an inspiring sense of decency.
So, yes, while there’ve been understandably more important things on my mind the past week than the battles between politicians and media superstars, it got my goat Friday when I learned that former President George H.W. Bush had singled out Keith Olbermann and Rachel as “a couple of sick puppies” for their roles in coarsening the nation’s political discourse.
In context, the former President was being defensive about his son (you know, George W.) and got to Olbermann and Maddow by way of making the point that it isn’t just right-wing cable channels that are cruising the mean streets of broadcasting, stealing hubcaps and breaking windows.
Okay, sure, part of Olbermann’s success is that after the cable news channels had handed over their keys to right wingers after 9/11, he not only punched back when his show debuted six years ago, but he openly baited Limbaugh and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. So, for K.O., this kind of back and forth comes with the territory.
But Maddow’s show is a different exercise and to be exact, there are at least 3,003 reasons why she’s no sick puppy. 
For starters, she (like Olbermann) is hardly an Obama apologist. She’s taken on the new President’s hypocrisy on issues like gay rights and executive abuses of power with as much conviction as she went after the seemingly endless faults of George W. Bush. More importantly, Maddow works as hard as anybody in broadcasting to frame issues with facts and historical context. At times, she talks too fast. But that’s because she’s trying to do justice to complicated issues on a news show that has to compete in a timeslot and in a medium where the audience expects to be entertained. As often as not, Maddow uses her sense of humor as a means to inject information that would not ordinarily make it on the air because it would seem to be too boring.
Here’s the thing: Rachel Maddow’s increasingly popular and decorated program only works because of what her talents and her values add to it. The talent resides in her formidable intellect. But beyond the talent is an engaging curiosity and a moral seriousness that surfaces most often when she is interviewing or exchanging views with people she disagrees with. She invites conflict frequently, but navigates it with an admirable ease that any journalist would envy. To say she has a quick mind is to say that Fred Astaire had quick feet.
On paper, you wouldn’t think her show would work. In a perfect world, viewers would reward broadcasters for taking on substantive issues in a thoughtful way. But that has never been the world of American television, even when Edward R. Murrow was on the air. After watching the Rachel Maddow Show for a year, my sense is that it works almost in spite of her ambitions to deal seriously with issues. Rather, the show works and succeeds because of what this rare person brings to it on several different levels.
So, senior Bush really couldn’t be further from the truth. If broadcasting were to someday lead a return toward civility in American public discourse, it will because of Rachel Maddow. Not in spite of her.
–Tim Connor
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