Time reporter Molly Ball offered a post-election valentine to Doug Jones and his Democratic backers in an article titled “Change in the Heart of Dixie” in their Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue. One interesting and constant omission in Ball’s piece was the role of The Washington Post in its very-helpful-to-Democrats investigative reporting on November 9 on Roy Moore’s odd dating habits (and on one occasion, an accusation of sexual touching) with teenage girls.
The first Republican primary was on August 15, followed by a runoff on September 26. But the Post only started tracking down accusers after the GOP dust had settled and the ballot could not be changed. Moore, like President Trump was an “accused sexual predator,” not a term Time preferred for Bill Clinton.
Jones faced an unusually weak opponent in Roy Moore, the twice-defrocked former state Supreme Court justice who was accused, after winning the Republican nomination, of preying on teenage girls. But 13 months ago, Alabama also faced a referendum on an accused sexual predator who struck divisive themes while seeking to discredit the media, and the result was very different. Since Trump was elected, something has changed in the American electorate — something big enough to flip one of America’s reddest states....
The defeat of an alleged sexual predator was particularly symbolic for women, who have led a wave of activism since Trump was elected. The women who came forward to accuse Moore said they broke decades of silence because they thought they might finally be heard. Even as Moore was trying to discredit his accusers, high-profile men across the spectrum — in Hollywood, in media, in business and in politics — faced long-overdue judgment for their past actions.
As we've established, Time magazine was never interested in "long-overdue judgment" for Bill Clinton, even when women accused him of rape. That was fodder for "vociferously conservative" editorialists that wouldn't have much "traction." And yet, Ball was worried that "partisans" on the right were "impervious to disagreeable facts."
The Moore supporters in attendance were certain he hadn’t done the things of which he’d been accused. Had he won, it would have deepened the sense that partisans are cocooned in their own separate realities, impervious to disagreeable facts. According to exit polls, nearly all of those who voted for Moore believed the allegations against him were false. “It is so wrong for those women to tell these vicious lies,” Bernadette Pittman, who traveled to Alabama in her capacity as the head of Northwest Florida Bikers for Trump, told me. “I am a victim of sexual assault, and I know you can’t keep a secret like that for 38 years. It would kill you.”
As might be expected from Time, there was a lot of Democratic happy talk about how Republicans aren’t facing a 2018 wave, but a “tsunami.” Seven years ago, when Scott Brown pulled off a shocking victory in deep-blue Massachusetts, the tone was dark. The Time headline was “Mass Mutiny” and warned Brown’s victory “may have derailed Obama’s health care reform.”
Then-Time reporter Karen Tumulty said Scott campaigned against Obamacare, which would “raise taxes, hurt Medicare, destroy jobs, and run our nation deeper into debt.” She found the result was “poignant.” But what she meant was “bizarre.”
That such a message would resonate here was poignant, given that no one had fought harder and longer than Kennedy for universal health care, something that the terminally ill liberal lion has referred to before his death in August as “the cause of my life.” And it was all the more ironic considering that Massachusetts has come closer than any other state to assuring coverage of all of its citizens, thanks to a 2006 law that was championed by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, who was celebrating onstage with Brown on election night.
Kennedy was not remembered as the politician who left a woman to drown after driving off a bridge. He was just a sympathetic "liberal lion."
The cover of Time that week (dated February 1, 2010) was a picture of Obama in the Oval Office in black and white with the headline “NOW WHAT?” Obama granted an interview to one of his many admirers at Time, Joe Klein, who mournfully assessed the impasse: “His has been a serious and substantive presidency. But the question, a year in, is whether it has been politically tone-deaf – and why the best presidential orator in a generation finds it so hard to explain himself to the American people.”
One reason? Klein blamed dastardly Republicans who “took a turn toward nihilism” on Obamacare, as they “demagogued nonexistent provisions of the bill, like ‘death panels.’”
