Tim Russert Meets Two Candidates

Imagine if Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama actually encountered each other in the NBC studio this morning and shared the idea of a joint appearance on Meet the Press instead of each doing his own half-hour shift. Both men might have raised their game by rising briefly above their intraparty squabbles. They might have achieved a bipartisan dissident consensus on Pakistan, neither man being a Musharraf fan. Best of all, they might have thrown Tim Russert off his game, which remains nothing more than "Gotcha!"

Unfortunately, neither candidate could think outside of their Bipolarchy boxes, so they took their scheduled turns on the hot seat. For Huckabee Russert was loaded for bear, but overall I think the Arkansas held up well. He defended his "bunker mentality" remarks about the Bush Administration and restored his credibility a bit on the Pakistan question. On the latter, he had exactly the right answer on whether that accursed country should hold its election on schedule. While Obama later opined that a short delay might be a good idea, Huckabee said that it wasn't his business to advise the Pakistanis.

On immigration Huckabee led Russert on quite a chase. The interviewer was determined to discover contradictions in Huckabee's comments against penalizing American-born children of illegal immigrants and his recommendations for deportation to the back of the line. The former governor said that the native-born little Americans are children first, citizens second, and should go back across the border as their families wait for their legal turn to immigrate. But doesn't a deporation scheme contradict an earlier statement in which Huckabee said the U.S. economy could not go on without immigrants? Here the Arkansan had his best answer. They're not all going to be deported in one day, he explained to Russert. While his answers raise fresh questions about whether crackdowns on the undocumented should be timed to the convenience of the business cycle, Russert was ready to move on.

On religion and related questions Huckabee said mostly the right things. He reminded Russert that he didn't hold tent revivals in Little Rock or replace the state capitol dome with a steeple. Asked if he'd have any problem putting atheists in his government, he replied that he probably had some in his Arkansas regime. On abortion, he said that his objections didn't depend on religious conviction. On the same topic, however, he took the usual gutless position of refusing to punish aborting mothers, and he was more concerned that aborting doctors were violating the Hippocratic oath -- a pagan vow, mind you. He tried to soft-pedal his condemnations of homosexuality by citing the Christian position that everyone is a sinner, as if to say that he hadn't singled out homosexuals for any special stigma. The problem with that position is that no sexual relations among consenting adults should be considered sinful at all, but I didn't expect Russert to realize this.

Finally, it was Huckabee's opinion that Mitt Romney is sort of a mean guy.

Russert's questioning of Obama was more limited in scope. The first round was Pakistan, where the Senator distinguished his position from pro-surge Huckabee's by blaming Bush's Iraq obsession for instability in Pakistan and environs. At the same time, he repudiated the insinuation that his campaign had blamed the Bush policy directly for Benazir Bhutto's death.

Overall, Russert was in his B-mode with Obama. His A-mode, which he employed on Huckabee and on Ron Paul last week, is to confront the guest with past statements. With Obama, his approach was to ask what the Senator thought of what others said about him, most notably Bill Clinton. There followed a lot of dead air as the experience question was restated. Finally, Russert took a substantial turn and challenged Obama's health plan on the basis of some writer's judgment that it would irk the insurance companies because people could opt out of buying coverage until they were sick.

I didn't use a stopwatch, but my impression was that Russert spent less time with Obama than with Huckabee. Given Russert's tactics, for that the Senator might be grateful, but it may also show that Obama's "inexperience" means less paper trail for interviewers to pounce on, and may prove an asset down the line. I still think a joint appearance might have been more enlightening about both men. It would be like New England and Dallas (or maybe I should say Indianapolis and Green Bay) meeting in the regular NFL season before a possible Super Bowl encounter. Russert would be in the position of the sportscaster who predicts how they'd do in the big game based on how they deal with one another now. There's nothing in the nature of the American Bipolarchy that necessarily forbids a political version of interleague play. It's simply a failure of imagination on the part of both parties and the media. Maybe the sports metaphor will spark ideas in some minds, but maybe that's just my imagination working.