Over two years ago, I kicked The New York Times out of the Abbreviated Pundit Round-up. That decision seems doubly justified this morning.
At the time, it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision. I’d already long since dropped looking at any columns from Maureen Dowd, and while Ross Douthat lecturing the Pope on how to be Catholic was nice fodder for a few Sundays, that shtick was really getting pretty stale. Still, columns from the Times were making up a third to half of the average Sunday APR at that point. Then the editorial page dropped some old writers and replaced them with new additions, including columnists who they knew going in were climate crisis deniers who had been paid to shill for polluters. Finally, the Times made the decision to hand the entire editorial page over to Trump supporters, so those poor, unappreciated folks who were only getting a constant stream of sympathetic stories on page one, could kick progressives in the face unchallenged. It was definitely time to go.
At the start of this year, I began including Paul Krugman’s column once again at the request of many readers. Krugman is a fantastic asset to the nation, and one of the best at demystifying the kind of economic issues that Wall Street would really like to remain mysterious. But he’s not going to be here this week, or any week for the foreseeable future. I will miss his column. I’ll especially miss those times when I disagree with him and get to splash my puddle-deep knowledge all over his Nobel Prize. But I will not include Krugman, or anyone else, from the editorial page at The New York Times so long as that editorial page is under the control of people who think this is just “poor phrasing.”
They won’t miss APR. I’m sure they do not know this feature exists. Removing NYT columns from the Sunday morning round-up is unlikely to cause a measurable dip in their readership. They’ll never know it happened. But I will.
Going forward, I will continue to use The New York Times as a source on non-editorial items only when a story is not adequately covered by some other outlet. And I will approach any original reporting by the Times with extreme reservations. Because this is far from the first time that the current management team at the Times has demonstrated extraordinarily bad judgement. This is simply beyond the pale. When incidents like this keep happening, how is it possible to trust their judgement on issues of national import? Until the leadership of The New York Times owns up to the damage they are doing to themselves as an institution, and how that damage is affecting journalism in general, they are out of here.
Now, let’s read other pundits.
Jonathon Chait doesn’t like anyone in the Democratic primary.
New York Magazine
In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, an exotic political theory promoted by the party’s most left-wing flank suddenly gained wide circulation. The appeal of Bernie Sanders proved Democrats were ready to embrace socialism, or at least something close to it; and Donald Trump’s election proved a nominee with extreme positions could still win. These two conclusions, in combination, suggested the party would move as far left as activists preferred at no political cost.
I’m starting off with Chait this morning just to show that simply publishing a column that consists of setting up a flimsy straw man, then knocking it down with clots of bullshit—which is exactly what Chait does here—isn’t enough to get a column banned.
Neither of these conclusions was actually correct. The Bernie Sanders vote encompassed voters who opposed Hillary Clinton for a wide array of reasons — including that she was too liberal — and were overall slightly to the right of Clinton voters. And political-science findings that general election voters tend to punish more ideologically extreme candidates remain very much intact. (Trump benefited greatly by distancing himself rhetorically from his party’s unpopular small-government positions, and voters saw him as more moderate than previous Republican nominees, even though he predictably reverted to partisan form once in office.)
That … is simply the worst understanding of the last election cycle that I’ve seen crammed into a single paragraph. But it does serve to make me feel better about dismissing Chait’s analysis of the situation going into 2020.
Leonard Pitts has an answer for Chait that’s a lot better than I could deliver.
Miami Herald
Our subject today is a word.
It seems to be the word of the moment, at least on the political left. One can hardly read an opinion page or watch cable news without confronting this tiresome term, this irksome idiom.
For the love of heaven, people, please stop saying “electability.”
Note, please, that the last president was a black man with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., who came to office with just a few years of senatorial experience. His successor was a TV reality show host with no government experience whatsoever and a history of racist, misogynistic and incompetent behavior.
Neither was electable by any traditional measure. Both were elected, nevertheless. So what does “electability” mean?
Electability is the least electable quality. Because electability is a synonym for “known quantity.” Which is also known as “boring.” The last “electable” person to get elected was probably George Bush. As in George H. W. Bush.
But here’s the thing: it is hard to escape a conviction that those raising questions of “electability” actually have far more in mind. Meaning a perceived need to sway Trump voters in next year’s election. That’s the unavoidable subtext of the ongoing debate over whether Democratic candidates are moving “too far to the left” in offering plans to, say, forgive student loan debt or extend health care to all.
Beg pardon, but: “too far to the left” for whom? …
Ask yourself: when is the last time you saw the GOP wring its hands over whether its policies were attractive to Obama voters? Win or lose, the right knows what it believes, and it does not change that to chase voters who hold it in contempt. Note that after its 2012 “autopsy” advised the party to be more inclusive, the GOP instead doubled down on its message of white grievance - and won.
Just because I put him up here instead of at the end doesn’t mean you’re not obligated to go read all of Pitts’ column. Because of course you are.
Mike Littwin is no Chait, but he also isn’t all that excited about the last debate.
Colorado Independent
The real news from the Houston debate was not Joe Biden’s overpraised performance. He was OK for the first hour, not so much after that and that’s not even counting the late-breaking record player reference. Or the continued benefit to Elizabeth Warren for making Sanders’s points better, and more reassuringly, than Bernie can. Or Julian Castro’s cheap shot at Biden’s memory/age. Or the Yang Gang Lottery, now officially open. What more is there to say on Andrew Yang except how did this guy make the debate stage while a U.S. senator watches on TV?
And the real news certainly wasn’t the networks’ insistence that each debate begin with an extended take on health care reform even as all the candidates — OK, with the exception of Kamala Harris, of course — continue to say exactly what they had said in previous debates. ...
No, the real news came from the third tier. And the reaction to that news may say much about the future of the Democratic primary.
I’m on record saying that Cory Booker had the best overall performance in the debate, combining rhetoric, humor, the personal, and positions. Now, let’s see what Littwin thinks …
Cory Booker had another strong debate performance, funny and passionate. And yet, he was just as good in the second debate and that didn’t matter at all. In a post-debate interview on CNN, he joined Castro in taking a swing at Biden, citing the former vice-president’s tendency to meander, while questioning whether Biden can “carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.” It was a hard shot — Booker said it wasn’t ageism, that Biden has always been this way — but it wasn’t a Castro-level cheap shot.
So great! We’re in agreement. Except … to be fair, Littwin goes on to praise Beto O’ Rourke for having his “best day in the race since his first one” and even Klobuchar for “her best debate performance.”
… meaning that for the first time anyone noticed, she was on the stage. But her platform seems to be that since she’s from the middle of the country — Minnesota — she, uh, can appeal to people in the middle of the country.
Art Cullen provides the economic view from Iowa.
Storm Lake Times
The President says the economy is doing great. Yet this week he tweeted that the “boneheads” at the Federal Reserve Board should cut interest rates to “zero or less” to compensate for his ill-considered trade wars leading the world into recession. So maybe the economy is not so great after all.
The stock market and other economic indicators have shown steady growth since the Great Recession of 2008, thanks to the “boneheads” at the Fed and the Obama Administration. Historically low interest rates fueled the recovery, and have stayed abnormally low for an abnormally long time. It is widely feared that the economy is bound for recession — in rural Iowa, we have been stuck there as long as the mind can reel. The Fed has almost no room to move to stimulate markets.
Not so, says Donald Trump. We can pay Wall Street to take our money! Which is sure to work. Just like Trump’s massive tax giveaway to billionaires. Just like Trump’s removal of regulations on clean water and clean air. Just like allowing corporations to move money into the country without paying any taxes at all. These things are going to make the economy go up eleventy-jillion percent! And boy, it’s a good thing no one ever has to worry about deficits.
Or, think of it this way: Over our lifetimes we have witnessed one-earner households go to two earners, the inability of people to buy their own homes, the evaporation of labor unions, the destruction of independent livestock operations and real markets, and almost no new single-family home construction in any given year. This in Storm Lake. A manufacturing worker today earns half as much as he did in 1975, in real terms. You can’t attend college on a summer job anymore.
You can’t even find a summer job anymore. Because those things that teenagers picked up in 1975 are now the third job of an adult who is trying to make up for lost income and lost benefits by working twice as much.
Wait. I want to get in this last part.
Trump said he would make these places great again. Now he is talking about negative interest rates. What a fool.
Joan Walsh was less than taken with Joe Biden’s performance at the debate.
The Nation
George W. Bush wasn’t known for his way with words, and yet one phrase from his 2000 presidential campaign has infiltrated my political lexicon: “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Bush was talking about low educational expectations for poor kids of color, but I always use it when I see the pundit class praise a politician who’s flailing—just because he hasn’t drowned yet.
Vice President Biden is getting a break from “the soft bigotry of low expectations” in terms of assessing his debate performance last night. No, he didn’t rant, prevaricate, or unravel. But he did not do well—not by any standard other than “well, he woke up Friday morning and he’s still in the race.” He is, but he won’t be for long if he doesn’t pull it together.
Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. Biden might not be able to pull that off, but he can definitely give a rambling answer, one in which he cuts himself off mid-sentence over and over again, and way too many pundits will still declare “well, he didn’t hurt himself.” Some of the answers Biden gave in the third debate were okay, but a couple were definitely not okay.
Biden’s worst answer by far came when he was asked about the issue that’s dogged him most: his various stands on race, going back to the start of his career in the 1970s. ...
DAVIS: In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?
BIDEN: Well, they have to deal with the—look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure that we are in a position where—look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise, the equal raise to getting out—the $60,000 level.
Good luck finding an answer to the question that was asked. Whenever Joe Biden says “look,” you can go back over what he was saying and see the point when he realized he was about to wander into something really unacceptable. So he leaves that thought in mid-sentence and just starts a new one with “look.”
Michael Tomasky says it doesn’t matter how Biden performed, because we’re stuck with him.
Daily Beast
It wouldn’t shock me if 30 years from now, some time capsule reveals that Julián Castro was trying to help Joe Biden by basically accusing him of being senile about 35 minutes into the debate. It looked like a hit in real time, and some in the audience laughed and hooted, but it was way too much. Biden was more or less stumbling his way through the debate in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed, but Castro was over the top and and just looked mean.
It was an odd debate. All the build-up was about having the three heavyweights—Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders—on the same stage for the first time, which would surely mean that Warren and Sanders were going to lay it on Biden thick to prove that he was too much the mushy centrist and just way too old for this (even though he’s younger than Sanders, by 14 months). But they didn’t manage to lay a glove on him.
It might be pointed out that Elizabeth Warren didn’t try to lay a glove on Biden. Or on anyone else. When it comes to debates, Warren has a plan for that. And her plan is — stay out of the fray. She answers her questions, in detail, and never mentions the name of another candidate unless it’s to compliment them. At one point in the third debate she was content to stand silent for almost 40 minutes, while everyone else shoved and wrangled.
Biden still can’t complete a complex sentence without stopping himself in the middle. That Afghanistan explanation was… what?! He was incoherent sometimes. What kind of offenders shouldn’t face jail time? He said one thing but obviously meant another.
Look, I mean … Look. Honestly, I think voters are just looking for a safe rock to cling too in the chaotic downpour that is Donald Trump. So far, Biden looks safe enough. The other candidates don’t have to tear him down to win, they just need to be seen. And look solid.
Aisha Sultan is talking about something local, but I’m including it for local reasons.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It’s silly to get sentimental about an old building, especially one that has seen as much misery as this one.
But ever since the packing started in earnest in the newsroom of the Post-Dispatch building downtown, which is headed two blocks east to smaller digs, I’ve been having flashbacks. I remember walking into the imposing six-story, brick-and-stone building as a 21-year-old intern.
Like many visitors, I paused to read the Pulitzer platform on the stone lobby wall. Joseph Pulitzer, whose family still owned the paper when I got here, wrote it on April 10, 1907: “I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
I had no idea that the Post-Dispatch was moving out of the Post-Dispatch building. I mean … how can they? I worked in downtown St. Louis for three decades within a few blocks of that building and it’s exactly what a the home of a great newspaper should be. You stand in that lobby and expect to see Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell come shooting around the corner at any moment, trailed by Lou Grant and maybe Clark Kent. It is just so a newspaper building. So the Post-Dispatch building.
This is my 21st year walking into this same building. I’ve spent nights here and worked every single holiday shift in those early years. In the meantime, I’ve gotten married and had two children, who first visited the newsroom as babies in strollers and now could drive here. …
I’ve wandered every floor of this space, from the presses in the subfloor basement to the executive suites at the top. Packing up my desk was like excavating the past: Old notebooks filled with interviews. A pay stub from 2004. A pin-back button a reader made featuring a phrase from a column I had written. A stack of thank-you notes from students I had led on a tour of the place. A picture of my daughter with her elementary school newspaper club when they visited.
The Post-Dispatch is the only survivor of what were three general circulation dailies that existed in St. Louis when I started working downtown. A few months back, they announced they were letting go their entire proof-reading staff. Think about that — no proof-readers for a major daily newspaper. And now the Post-Dispatch is moving from the Post-Dispatch Building to … somewhere smaller.
Nancy LeTourneau on something that has gone up, and not yet come down.
Washington Monthly
When the devastation of even the Sandy Hook shooting failed to move Republican Senators to vote for something as basic as requiring a background check on every gun purchase, it appeared as though hope was lost for ever making any headway on this issue. But lately momentum seems to be building. …
With almost every mass shooting, a new group of activists is born from the ashes of grief. The families of Columbine students were initially alone. But more recent events sparked everything from Gabby Gifford’s organization to the Sandy Hook Promise and March For Our Lives. On the one hand, we can be grateful to these brave survivors of gun violence. But it is absolutely heartbreaking that they have all come about as a result of so much loss. Wednesday brought a sad reminder of just how long some of these folks have been pouring their hearts and souls into this effort.
I don’t usually include tweets, but how could you not include this one? Now, take a look at the top of the page, up there in the Civiqs graphs. See the one on gun control? See how it has yet to come down since the shootings in El Paso and Dayton? Here, let me put the whole thing in.
That certainly looks like people saying they have had enough. And it should be a chart that strikes terror in the heart of any politician still thinking they can pocket NRA dollars and come away unscathed. That’s not saying that everything goes back to normal after each shooting. It’s saying the ice under the NRA gets thinner with each shooting.
Charles Pierce on how Team Trump keeps breaking the law, and laughing about it.
Esquire
On Friday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who defeated the mighty John Bolton through superior ass-kissing, must have been feeling chuffed, because he took the occasion of a speech in Washington to confirm that the current president* is in stark violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause and, therefore, should be impeached and removed from office. …
Pompeo was speaking to the Concerned Women for America, a conservative nonprofit group that invited him and Vice President Pence to address its 40th anniversary gala held at the Trump hotel that sits blocks from the White House. “I look around. This is such a beautiful hotel,” Pompeo said. “The guy who owns it must have been successful somewhere along the way.”
…
This always has been the most obvious evidence of a massive level of corruption at the heart of this presidency*. (That Pompeo was able to joke about it openly should give you some idea how vast it really is.) The only thing that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago really knows about his job is how to line his pockets while he still has it. I'm not sure how "novel" these legal questions really are. The Constitution says quite plainly that you're not allowed to use the office to turn a buck. The president* swore to "faithfully execute" that very document. He's turning a buck on the presidency* and his people are out there bragging about it for laughs. The only thing novel about the situation is that he hasn't been thrown out on his ear yet.
Hey, Conway already laughed off the Hatch Act. And Mnuchin laughed off Congress’ demand for Trump’s taxes. And just yesterday we learned that acting DNI Maguire has laughed off the laws for turning over whistle blower reports. And all that’s on top of laughing off over a dozen congressional subpoenas. Laws. They are definitely for little people.
A couple of quick notes ….
Somewhere around the first of October, I’m going to ask for names of columnists again. I really appreciate the folks who were pointed out last year and have enjoyed the variety of viewpoints they bring. Even Jonathan Chait. I don’t always use them all, but I try.
But I’m also planting this seed now—somewhere around the end of the year, I’m thinking of ending my run doing Sunday APR. I started it … honestly, I can’t even remember when I started doing it. Let’s just say I’ve been at it for some time. I love APR. I think it’s obvious that I’m a little (or a lot) looser with what I say in this column than in the day in and day out reporting and analysis. And I love the feedback, the feel, the community that comes with it each week. But I am the World’s Slowest Writer, and getting through the column often carries me way into the wee hours. It’s simply wearing on me.
Plus, I definitely think you guys would benefit from having a different finger spinning the Sunday morning platters; a different voice providing that color commentary. Maybe you’ll get someone who isn’t so grouchy six Sundays out of six. That seems like a pretty good bet. Anyway, you start thinking about it, I’ll start thinking about it, and we’ll see what happens.
