Michael Wolff

USA TODAY

Is a vote against a political party also a vote against the network that supports it?

The Democrats' sinking fortunes have been pretty accurately charted in the declining ratings at MSNBC, the party's house network, which culminated, on election night, in a 22% fall from the last midterm election in the all-important 25-to-54 age group.

MSNBC's problem is almost exactly the same as the Democrats' problem: It built its future around a vivid and dramatic hero who, unfortunately, turned out to be both opaque and conflict averse. MSNBC now has a lineup of ever-righteous and often sulky defenders of President Barack Obama, who seem, not just to conservatives but to many liberals, too, bizarrely tone deaf and lost in time.

This is just the sort of bad zeitgeist bet that can so often happen in television programming.

The network, seeking to imitate Fox's success in building a loyal audience of politically motivated viewers, first managed to boost its low ratings by aligning itself with the widespread anti-Bush feeling. Then, thinking it had hit something of a jackpot with the Obama election, it became the voice of Obama's anticipated remaking of the nation.

But at Fox, Roger Ailes, the chief, has deep roots in conservative thinking. Fox's alignment against all things liberal, which first began in President Bill Clinton's Lewinsky years, has had a remarkably successful run because of Ailes' fine antennae as to the subtle changes in conservative aspirations and temperament.

At MSNBC, it was more an outsider's calculated strategy, even a cynical one, to build an Obama-centric network. Not that different, say, from some Manhattan old guys doing a show about Brooklyn girls. Or suits in New York thinking duck hunters might be cool. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And, indeed, it seemed like a reasonable bet that Obama would be good television.

MSNBC's president, Phil Griffin, is not a political person. He's a TV pro. (Ailes, at Fox, has the virtue of being both a gifted political operative as well as an experienced programmer.) Griffin is a pro who has likely survived less because of innovative, golden-gut programming instincts than because of just plain old survival instincts. At MSNBC, he played the cable-niche hand he was dealt.

The network, a hopeless laggard, finally started to break out of the cable news depths when its anchorman, Keith Olbermann, began to rant against President George W. Bush and against Fox. Olbermann quickly became MSNBC's star and big kahuna, and was behind the hiring of liberal radio commentator Rachel Maddow, who became a second anti-Bush, pro-democratic programming pillar. Olbermann, however, famously difficult, was ousted by his NBC bosses. That left Griffin to pursue, with quite some hyperbole and inadvertent self-caricature — including Alec Baldwin's brief moment and Ronan Farrow's agonizingly longer one — a programming strategy to support the Democrats and adulate Obama.

Arguably, this strategy was bucking another development, both linked to Obama but larger than him, too: an erosion of political interest, and shrinking of the dedicated core. Beyond the Republican victory last week, the more indicative trend, crucial to both parties as well as to the news media, was the perilous drop for all networks in election night viewership, with all experiencing a dramatic fall-off from the 2010 midterms. Gridlock is not much of a story, after all. And social issues, which had fueled a decade or more of political scares, seem increasingly neutralized and no longer such cliff-hangers in the narrative.

This erosion suggests that the new core will be ever-smaller than the previous core, meaning the networks will need even more vividness and heroism and home team razzmatazz to focus the niche, just at a moment when political drama and pride, especially for the Democrats, are in vastly short supply. Or, alternatively and precariously, they will have to enlarge the niche — "We've got to get outside Washington and open up our aperture a little," Griffin told The New York Times — quite a dangerous, even existential, play in cable television, where the niche is the brand. And yet where is there to go?

In the past, when the Republican's have lost, Fox has doubled down on outrage and fervor. This seems harder to do in the stub years of the Obama term. It's not just an Obama problem, but a Hillary problem, too.

In character terms, the problem is making Obama sympathetic and compelling when he appears not to want to be either of those things. In dramatic terms, the problem is that he seems inclined to shrink in the face conflict rather than rise to it. Who really is eager to watch the Obama show?

Then, in a major setback for MSNBC, the upcoming presidential election, ordinarily a reliable narrative of shifting alliance and oddball characters and, ideally, uncertain outcome, is frozen in place by Hillary Clinton. There is no story as far as the Democrats are concerned. There is nothing to unfold.

Who, but a dedicated masochist, will diligently watch that show? Clinton is a purposeful non-character. And what she stands for, largely some grand establishment return, is the opposite of the sense of insurgency that makes for political storytelling. Such storytelling is what Ailes has so successfully, and for so long, convinced Republicans was good for them. (Of course, good for him, as well.)

That is finally the point. Griffin is no Ailes. And MSNBC is not Fox, with its ability to direct as well as portray the political drama. A poor political operative, Griffin has painted himself into a corner like political parties so often do, losing the base, and yet without the philosophical wherewithal to appeal to a larger group. There is the broken clock theory of politics and cable programming, in which, if you just keep doing what you're doing, the zeitgeist returns to you. But politicians and media executives, swimming against the tide, usually lose their jobs before their hour returns.

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