Why Democrats Should Go on Fox News

Chris Wallace is unbearably smug, with a perma-smirk that makes you want to pour a pint of beer in his lap. He's a conservative who pretends to play everything down the middle and loves to accuse the other side of bias, even when he has to distort the facts to get there.

He's also right when he says that Barack Obama and John Edwards should go on his show.

The issue of how Democrats should handle Fox News has been percolating for a while, and it's only going to get hotter in the 11 months before the next presidential election.

Wallace, who hosts Fox News Sunday, is complaining that some top Democrats shun Fox News while granting interviews to its rivals. Of the leading Democratic candidates, only Hillary Clinton's made time for him.

Here's what he told the Politico's Michael Calderone:

"Just imagine if the Republicans, under pressure from right-to-life groups, refused to appear on CNN or MSNBC. I think there would be holy unshirted hell. I think there would be such talk about these people being captives of the extreme right wing and why are they afraid to answer questions. And I think the absence of that is very telling. At this point, it has become kind of a loyalty test inside the Democratic Party, ... pandering to the far-left-wing. And we live with it."

That last part is classic Wallace bogus. Democrats don't avoid Fox as some kind of sop to the MoveOn.org crowd. They do it for the same reason they limit their press availability in general: because they're afraid of getting tripped up, caught in a flip-flop or a contradiction.

(Side note: Have you noticed there's no such thing as the moderate left in Fox News Land? Or if there is, Juan Williams is the only resident. Everything else is the province of the Far Left Wing.)

Is the danger of getting tripped up higher on Fox News than on CNN or CNBC? Absolutely. Just look back to Bill Clinton's appearance on Fox News Sunday last year. Clinton got flustered and visibly angry after Wallace, bringing up Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, asked, "Why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?"

That's a pretty good example of what Democrats can expect from Fox: legitimate questions, but framed in a subtly loaded way. They can also expect to be put on the defensive about national security, immigration and other issues regarded as Republican home turf.

But so what? Fox may have a point of view, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum; it represents tens of millions of Americans. As I've said before, I don't buy the argument that CNN and MSNBC are the ideological mirror-image of Fox, but certainly Chris Matthews and Dan Abrams have obvious biases that they don't do much to disguise.

Democrats who think they can keep from giving Fox face time should consider what happened when the leading Republicans skipped a PBS debate geared to minority voters. Hoping to guard their vulnerable spots, they effectively ceded an entire voting bloc to the other side. Obama and Edwards may well do themselves some damage under Wallace's questioning. But they'll do more damage trying to avoid him.

ADDENDUM, 4:51 p.m.: Zack Roth over at the Media Mob disagrees with my assertion that Democrats don't shun Fox to please liberal partisans, and he has a point: MoveOn et al did seem to play a role in pressuring Democrats to steer clear of the Fox News debate in Detroit (which was subsequently canceled). But I also think in some measure the protests gave the candidates cover to skip an event that carried no particular upside for them.

In any case, I disagree with his assertion that giving in to such pressure is "smart long-range politics." Democrats should be pushing for liberals to have more representation on Fox, not less. It will be hard for Barack Obama, in particular, to sell his message of post-partisanship in the general election without making overtures to what Roth calls "the one-third or so of Americans who self-identify as ideological conservatives."

ADDENDUM 2, 12/14/07: As several commenters have pointed out, yes, Chris Wallace is a registered Democrat -- although he's said he only registered with that party because in his home district of Washington, D.C., the winners of most races are effectively chosen in the Democratic primary. He claims to be non-partisan; I base my assertion that he's a conservative on various public statements he's made about the liberalism of the media.

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Chris Wallace photo by Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images

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