Friday, June 21, 2024

Meta-panic and the Importance of Timing

June 19th...

One day later...

And this from Josh Marshall:

But the heart of the [Axios] piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.”

“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary.”

I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January. (Literally not kidding about this.) We’ve been reading about these fearful strategists for months.

Purely at a definitional level I don’t get how a tie race can be “dire.” How is that possible, even by the dictionary? Scary, yes. Not ideal, absolutely. But a tie can’t be “dire.” That’s just not what dire means.

...

I have no doubt that if we’re back here in mid-November and Biden lost some of you will be saying, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself now, Josh.” And I think my answer will be “I mean, he lost. It was close but he lost. And that sucks. I never promised he would win.”

But I keep coming back to “dire.” There’s something legitimately clinical going on here. Some of it is DC journalists being attached to a narrative, one they’re invested in for various reasons. But Democrats and “Democratic strategists” play a role here too, whether or not they have the initials D and A. I’ve made my argument at some length that runaway pessimism has real world campaign impacts, in addition to simply being an Eeyore-ly and undignified way to live life. But there is some disconnect here that is worth understanding, worth taking a hard look at quite apart from its potential negative impacts on the election outcome. I wish I could give a good explanation for it beyond the inherent GOP tilt of most national political press coverage and intrinsic Democratic worry-wart-ism, both of which are certainly playing a role. But I can’t. For now I can only point to it as a standout example of the way that certain press and political narratives can remain curiously immune to actual evidence.

He's right, the word "dire" is really telling. It goes to the point we've been making that arguments we've seen from Silver, Klein and others that Biden is so far behind that he needs to do something incredibly risky is bizarrely disconnected from the actual polling.

I find this a little less inexplicable than Marshall does, at least in part because I've been spending a lot of time recently going through memoirs, interviews, and statements from New York Times writers and particularly editors (not to mention the publisher) and the central theme is how terrified almost all of them are at the thought of being accused of liberal bias. Given the influence of the paper, I'm certain they speak for lots of other national journalists.

They went to absurd lengths in 2016 to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and yet the message that much, perhaps most, of the country took away from their coverage was that they underestimated the chances of a Republican victory due to a bias against Trump. From this they learned the wrong lesson and they learned it too well. Not only have they taken the most pessimistic and critical view of the Biden campaign possible, they have also apparently internalized it so that when critics point out the flaws and inconsistencies, they angrily respond that people are asking them to abandon their journalistic standards.

This was exacerbated by the extended period of denial about Trump's chances of winning the 2024 nomination. Go back and read the New York Times' 2022 "analysis" showing that DeSantis was actually the real front runner or Slate's article insisting that Trump wouldn't even run. Along similar lines, check out their wildly overoptimistic coverage of Haley and Ramaswamy. By convincing themselves that Trump would go away on his own, they could frame every Biden story in the most negative way possible and engage in constant mean-girling of Harris without worrying about the consequences. When reality set in, they were fully invested in their narratives.

We'll leave the last word to Doug J.



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