Added July 21, 2012:
How did I see the confrontation? I thought Paul did as well as anyone could in the time given. Except for a few word slips, he was pretty cogent and effective. Bernanke looked discomfited in the middle, when he was questioned about the transfer of authority from Congress to the Fed and when the issue of secrecy was brought up. Other than that, he was impassive and spoke little. Paul wasn’t “subdued” at all. I don’t watch all his videos, but I’ve seen him a number of times in debate, and that was fairly straightforward Paul. If there was a white flag, I didn’t see it.
If he wasn’t as combative as some seem to think, it’s most likely because it’s his last such confrontation. He’s retiring, I’m told. Too bad.
I thought it was a fairly effective performance and a good wrap up of his major arguments. I think if you’d known nothing about the Fed until then, you would have got the salient points of the anti-Fed argument: he described Bretton Woods, exchange-rate and interest-rate manipulation; big government financing through debt; transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the wealthy; malinvestment; money supply expansion versus CPI inflation; the housing bubble; and the need for Congressional oversight.
I wouldn’t call it a knock-out, simply because Bernanke was so impassive through out.
That of course helps the media to reframe the confrontation anyway it suits them. Which is what Dana Milbank promptly did.
“Ron Paul Vs. Bernanke: final battle ends on surprising note,” David Grant, Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2012
“Ron Paul Has The Final Say,” Bob Adelman, New American, July 19, 2012
ORIGINAL POST
“Skull & Bones affiliated establishment journalist Dana Milbank taunts Ron Paul about the end of the “End the Fed” campaign in a piece entitled, “Ron Paul Fed Up With Trying To End The Fed” (Washington Post, July 18, 2012)
Well, I have plenty of problems with the whole Ron Paul movement these days (for a view from a Paul supporter see this:), but the piece does more than criticize Paul.
What it does is gloat.
Here are some lines from it, with my parsing.:
“He didn’t even make a dent in it.”
[LR: The Fed is unassailable]
“…Paul raised the white flag.”
[LR: The Fed has won…]
“For the fiery Paul, it was a subdued surrender.”
[LR: So now you know how powerful we really are, old man.]
“….treating him with the cautious affection one might use to address a crazy uncle.”
[LR: You didn’t reach the point where we’d have to assassinate you, so we’ll just let people know that you and your supporters can’t be taken seriously.]
“But Paul faded away with surprising deference.”
[LR: Yes. He’s under our thumb. We call the shots. He knows what’s good for him, so he’s fading away.]
“The one substantial challenge to Bernanke — Paul’s “audit the Fed” bill, which the House is expected to approve next week before it dies in the Senate — was easily dispatched by the Fed chairman,”
[LR: Audit the Fed is croaking.]
“The Paul to Bernanke word ratio this time was 12 to 1.”
[LR: He’s just a rambling old man. Real men don’t talk, they print.]
“There’s no constitutional reason why Congress couldn’t just take over monetary policy,” he said. “But I’m advising you that it wouldn’t be very good from an economic policy point of view.”
[LR: We’re the constitutionalists, not you. Audit the Fed is only about Congress taking over monetary policy, folks. Imagine! They can’t run a post office. How do you think they’re going to do with deep stuff like economics?]
“”At this point, the committee chairman cut him off. Paul’s time had expired.”
[LR: We’ve put up with you long enough, grandpa. Your time’s up. The game is over.]
The framing of the whole piece is quite masterful. There is not one substantial piece of analysis about the actual policies in question. We are not told what is involved in either “End the Fed” or “Audit the Fed.”
We are instead given information about procedure….rules regarding how bills go through the house, and how speakers get to speak. A contrast is set up between the grave, measured proceedings of the state and the law (the constitution) and the self-indulgent rambling of an aging politician.
The roles are reversed.
Paul becomes the political class. Bernanke becomes the embodiment of the constitution and of law.
From beginning to end we’re told how to think about what’s going on.
This is what we’re supposed to think:
Bernanke is sage, powerful and indulgent.
Paul is a crazy old man, who doesn’t know the elements of civility….or the constitution.
He’s an anti-government politician, but he’s for the government control of the money supply.
He cuts into other people’s time. He rambles on. He talks too much.
Paul is just a “supplicant” before the great Fed chairman. The final word is with the Fed.
So, even though he gets his fifteen minutes, it’s clear Paul doesn’t really understand the constitution or money.
And he’s for the government!
Notice how the piece distorts Paul’s position to make it look as if “Audit the Fed” (Paul’s fall-back position from “End the Fed”) is about putting arcane and complex professional matters into the hands of politicians.
Milbank turns Bernanke into the “private” expert and Paul into the bumbling government man.
That is sure to appeal to Americans of every political stripe. The average reader would immediately distrust anyone who intends to subject policies about the country’s money-supply to ignorant legislators driven by partisan bias.
What that does is clear.
It turns the whole anti-government argument against anti-government activists.
It also turns the pro-constitution argument against constitutionalists.
This is propaganda of the highest order.
