The following essay was written for the purpose of winning the WaPo punditry contest. It will not win for a variety of reasons, the most important being that it was never submitted to the WaPo contest. I missed the deadline. Also, I don't want to work for the Washington Post.
A further reason is that the essay breaks all the rules, particularly the rule that requires brevity, and probably the one that requires a command of the English language and its rules of syntax and spelling or whatever.
Nevertheless, the essay was written, and it had to be dumped somewhere, so, why not here?
I'm on Hiatus from politics right now, so there will be no impassioned pleas for the public option, nor any action elements to this diary - just a few answers to the age-old question after the jump:
Update: Thanks for the comments everyone. It's clear I don't have my sense of humor back. Everybody took this WAY too seriously. It was supposed to be light snark. Anyway thanks for playing along!
Why are pundits almost always wrong?
The most clearly obvious reason is:
Pundits all know each other. They're either all encamped together in the same government buildings and corporate dining rooms in Washington, DC, or jetting someplace important with other pundits to cover the same events in the same four-star hotels. Pundits abhor a vacuum.
Pundits can depend on each other for cover when they expound unsubstantiated drivel. They are experts at divining what slant of drivel other pundits will approve of before writing or dropping it into a column or saying it in 30 seconds on TV (five seconds if it's the Chris Matthews show). This drivel is known as "conventional wisdom." It's conventional all right, but not wisdom. It's punditry.
Punditry is wrong most of the time, though, not because it is drivel; most public policy is drivel, too. No, pundit drivel is usually wrong because it is high-class peer-approved junk-media drivel. It is language that has been examined and honed by pundits long enough for it to have been cleansed of all context and meaning.
Another reason is:
Punditry exists not to enrich the public discourse, but to enliven it. Therefore, the truth is not at a premium in punditry because the truth is complicated and boring. Speculation and staged TV disagreements are far more enlivening. People interested in truth become staffers. When they get tired of the truth, they can switch into pundits, and therefore safely ignore anything truly unpleasant.
Yet another reason is the competitive nature of punditry.
Punditry is a game not unlike Yahtzee, The game has no point other than to provide a basic structure for pundits to operate within. The object of the game is to extend the the likelihood of continuous paychecks and expense accounts to pundits as long as possible. This is an easy game to play as long as the pundit can keep it to 350 words or less and not irritate copyreaders too often. The winner is David Broder (It used to be Bob Novak, but he dropped out). A game with no purpose other than to win the game is unlikely to be useful to anyone other than the players. It's not even much good for gambling, although it can spur sidegames involving shots every time a pundit says "Republicans on the hill say…."
The final reason pundits are wrong is that they serve, unwittingly, an important service to mankind. They provide "perspective." Perspective is what you call it when a pundit says something or writes something so unbelievably and obviously stupid that a Ecuadorian farm laborer can tell you it's totally wrong and why. That means even you or I can do the same. Pundits exist so we can know for a fact that we could do their jobs much better than they do. It's a form of positive reinforcement to have our suspicions confirmed on a nearly hourly basis.
Still, somebody somewhere still has to have a reason to pay for the benighted endeavor of punditry. Surely they must have a reason beyond self-congratulation to keep writing pundits their fat paychecks.
That reason is Washington dinner parties. People must be invited, and congress critters are, in the main, pompous, or boring, or looking for a check themselves. Pundits are grateful to be invited because they can discuss David Broder's column exhaustively and with jaunty asides, unless they ARE David Broder, in which case a bemused raised eyebrow will suffice. For the party-givers, pundits are the jesters.
Of course, some pundits are more well thought of than others and get invited to the better parties. This is determined by the size of their rolodexes (now known as Blackberrys, iPhones for those who lean left). If a pundit has a large rolodex, and can remember some of the names in it and the acronym of the State Department hovel each person's card is filed under, they are considered powerful, for they have the wherewithal to quote nearly endless numbers of sources.
To sum up, pundits are wrong because each of their rolodexes contain the exact same party guests, mistresses, boyfriends, congressmen, Senators, staffers and spiritual guides as all the other pundits. So, when one pundit believes something is worth putting into a column somewhere, he is sure to have vetted it with the general mood of pundits in general, or at least stolen it from David Broder.
I wonder whatever happened to Bob Novak's rolodex?