Wednesday, July 31, 2024

The New York Times Editorial Board loves narratives, but they especially love narratives where they're the hero

This is quite the piece of work. Sanctimonious and self-serving. It is such a platonic ideal of New York Times editorial board posturing that, if it were to come in tweet sized bites, you would assume it was actually written by the Pitchbot.

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee, has the chance to encourage and embrace the kind of close examination that the public so far has had little opportunity to witness during the 2024 race.

Americans deserve a campaign that tests the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates; that highlights their differences and allows scrutiny of their plans; that motivates people to vote by giving them a clear account of how their choice in this election will affect their lives.

Americans deserve the opportunity to ask questions of those who are seeking to lead their government.

You know that whenever the NYT offers to speak for those of us among the great unwashed, it's going to be embarrassing and, at least in that respect, this does not disappoint. Unless I've gotten hold of a truncated version, the entire thing comes in at around 350 words, so we could take it line by line, but fortunately there's one paragraph that epitomizes the self-righteousness, fatally flawed ethics, and general dishonesty of the whole piece.

But she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly. Ms. Harris ought to challenge Mr. Trump to a series of debates or town halls on subjects of national importance, such as the economy, foreign policy, health care and immigration. Mr. Trump claims that he is ready and willing to participate in debates once Democrats have officially selected a nominee. Americans would benefit from comparing the two candidates directly.

[The linked article is also a remarkable exercise in calling a spade anything but a spade.] 

Two of the three sentences are so bad that we either have to conclude that the editorial board is almost completely ignorant of what actually happened or that these are deliberate lies of omission. In the first the board leaves out the fact that Harris has already been challenging Trump to debates or at least demanding that he show up to the one he already agreed to. Check out this clip from the day before the NYT ran its editorial.

If anything, the second sentence is even worse. It is absolutely absurd to talk about Trump's willingness to debate while making no mention of the fact that he just backed out. I'm tempted to stop here since anything else risks going into "other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" territory, but it's worth noting that the rationale has shifted by the day from ABC being unfair to him, to the fact that Obama had not at the time endorsed her, to her not yet being the official nominee to this...  

 

Despite the recent posturing on the subject, the value of presidential debates is not all that clear. Based on the history of the last 64 years, they haven't been particularly good at conveying information and substantive arguments, and to the extent they have mattered at all, they have tended to hinge on trivialities, gaffes, and appearances. Nixon's decision to forgo makeup, Gerald Ford's obvious misstatement about Russian influence, Reagan's movie star fame.

But once you accept the premise that debates are essential for democracy (let alone the sacred institution the NYT has been building them up as for months now), then recent events lead to a story that the New York Times editorial board desperately wants not to tell: we need to have debates but Trump backed out. Harris responded by demanding debates and trying to pressure and shame Trump into going along but he keeps coming up with new reasons to avoid them.

The board hates this version for at least a couple of reasons. First, there's no way to tell it without making the Democrat look good and the Republican bad, at least not without dumping the pro-debate premise. "Something is good. The Democrat wants to do it. A Republican is trying to stop it." is the kind of thing that ends up on page A14 in the paper of record.

More importantly though, it is a story that makes the New York Times a trivial character. In the version they published, they are wise and impartial judges and advisors, standing above the fray, alone seeing the big picture. We, the New York Times, defenders of democracy, are out there fighting for you the voters if only both sides would listen to our counsel. 

No institution in journalism has a culture more centered around the belief in its own superiority than does the New York Times. Few institutions do, period. The one other example that springs to mind are the Ivy leagues schools and even there I think the comparison might be a bit unfair. 

The NYT has made a string of disastrous decisions over the past thirty years, starting with Whitewater, Bush V Gore, and the Iraq war. In each case and in all the cases since, it has reacted by denying his own culpability and clinging even more tightly to its own self-deceptions. 


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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Know your Narratives

I have to confess that, when I talk about narratives in the press, the term is often inconsistent, ambiguous and inchoate. Along with conventional narrative elements, I might be talking about shared beliefs, attitudes, and all sorts of related concepts. With that caveat out of the way, here are what I consider the standard narratives that have shaped the political discourse over the past few years.

The end of Donald Trump.

The establishment press found Donald Trump endlessly unnerving, not so much for his racism, corruption, and fascist tendencies (they could be surprisingly cool with those), but because he put the lie to arguably the most cherished of all late 20th and early 21st century political narratives, the fundamental symmetry between the left and the right. You cannot both-sides Trump, at least not without making an ass of yourself. Plus, there was something undeniably scary about the cult of personality that had formed around the man.

Given all that, you can understand why after Biden won the election, the press embraced the idea that being labeled a loser would cause Trump's followers to abandon him. This narrative was questionable from the very beginning (and even before that. Check out our comments from 2019), but it was so enormously appealing that it continued to drive political commentary until as recently as the beginning of this year.

The narrative peaked around the middle of 2022 fueled by a self reinforcing cluster of analyses and articles like "Hear Me Out: Trump Won’t Run Again" by Slate's Jeremy Stahl with each writer credulously repeating the dubious arguments of all the others. As journalism it was an embarrassment, but for social scientists looking at herd mentality, it was a wonderful case study.

The rise of DeSantis.

A direct byproduct of the end of Trump narrative. Starting as early as 2021 and reaching near universal acceptance among the establishment press by the middle of 2022, almost every major news organization was heralding Ron DeSantis as an all but unstoppable political force in the upcoming presidential election. The man's actual history (Florida backbencher who attached himself like a remora to Donald Trump and managed to sneak into the governor's mansion just as the state was turning blood red) and his political talents (embarrassingly subpar for the governor of a big state) were ignored by all but a few smart and independent observers such as Josh Marshall and Michael Hiltzick. The peak of DeSantis mania and the Trump is doomed narratives was probably a comically bad but extremely influential analysis from the New York Times (you can see our real-time critique here).

Dobbs won't matter.

Almost immediately after the decision came down, a number of establishment press institutions such as the New York Times and even more notably Politico came out with various articles, opinion pieces, and analyses arguing that the overturning of Roe V Wade would have little impact on the upcoming elections in 2022 and 2024. We can probably describe the appeal of this one both to the desire of these institutions to appear sober and above it all, and their reluctance to anger conservatives with bad news. Needless to say, this narrative has not fared well against reality. The result has been near continual strategic retreats, each of which can be boiled down to "sure, abortion was a big deal in this last election, and here's why it won't matter next time."

This narrative has been an especially interesting example for a number of reasons. First, for its longevity. While all three we've mentioned so far started about the same time, the first two are long dead. This one, however, remains not only alive but very much kicking. The New York Times in particular has gone to extraordinary lengths to defend it, up to and including selectively editing JD Vance quotes to give the impression that he was moderating his position.

Another interesting aspect has been the way that the actual story has evolved while the standard narrative has not. Almost immediately after states started passing draconian laws, the actual story started changing from one about abortion to one about reproductive rights and women's rights. Overturning Dobbs had sweeping implications. Any discussion of its political impact now has as much to do with prenatal care, in vitro fertilization, and contraception, as it does with what we normally think of when we hear the word abortion. The narrative, however, is still mostly stuck.

Much of the conventional wisdom around the upcoming election is based on the assumption that Dobbs will play a smaller role than it did in 2022 and in the various special elections where it made its presence known. While this might be true, there is also considerable evidence arguing the exact opposite. IVF was not an issue two years ago. The fetal personhood movement is far more vocal now. Horror stories about miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies have continued to accumulate. Red states have continued to pass more extreme anti-abortion laws, while numerous states will have ballot measures countering them. A recording has recently emerged of the Republican vice presidential candidate suggesting national intervention to prevent women from traveling to other states to have abortions. Trump continues to brag at every possible venue about getting Roe overturned. Finally, having a woman at the top of the ticket pushes the issue to the forefront.

Nonetheless, NYT luminaries (David Leonhardt being perhaps the most recent example) continue to fall on their swords in defense of the paper's "nothing to see here" position.

Hapless Kamala.

This is the narrative on this list that almost had the greatest impact. I say "almost" because, at the moment, we appear to have a more unified and energized Democratic Party than we've had in the past decade, possibly much longer than that. The extent to which the party has come together in terms of support, enthusiasm, and money is remarkable, even historic, but it was far from obvious that this was how things would play out.

Perhaps the biggest fear of Democrats who were concerned about Biden stepping down was that it would trigger a feeding frenzy where everyone with an overdeveloped sense of ambition with throw their hats in the ring and every special interest group would start vying to be kingmaker. This fear was heightened by the constant lobbying of the New York Times, Nate Silver, etc. to make the process as disruptive as possible. Their argument for repeating what looked a hell of a lot like another 1972 was that Harris was such a historically bad candidate that she absolutely had to go. (You can find an example of Silver trying unsuccessfully to shore up the official version here.)

As with the other narratives on this list, this one depended more on playing to the biases and desires of elite journalists than it did on any evidence. For a press corps raised on the idea of liberal bias and easily intimidated/manipulated by conservatives, going after a Democratic vice president is the safest of safe moves and, if you truly internalized that definition of bias, it even feels like you're doing the right thing. Add to that the same misogyny that these people directed at Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren with an additional dollop of racism for good measure. Anti-Kamala narratives were always going to be an easy sell.

What about the evidence? While Harris's history may not suggest a political talent on the level of Reagan/Clinton/Obama, it is even less consistent with the story the New York Times and company have been telling us. [Emphasis added]

Ross Douthat: It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. [Anyone who thinks Ross Douthat has special insights into these decision making processes please raise your hand and slap yourself with it. -- MP] Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.

Let's look at the record. In California Harris ran three races. In the first two she was an underdog. In the third she dominated both the primary and the general election. In the historically competitive 2020 race facing almost 30 opponents, she seriously outperformed a number of candidates with better name recognition and more money. It was a campaign with notable missteps and she never really presented a serious threat to the three frontrunners, Biden, Sanders, and Warren, but if you're going to call that a "disastrous" campaign, you're going to have to come up with whole new adjectives to describe how the bottom two thirds of the field did.

We can argue over Harris's political talents (though based on recent events, we should be able to put an X through the "voters won't respond to her" argument), but the idea that she was so terrible that we should have passed over the legitimate successor who clearly had the support of Democratic primary voters in the process alienating to of the key pillars of the Democratic base was never based on the facts. It was based on a story that the most influential people in journalism told themselves. Just like the idea that Ron DeSantis was a gifted politician was based on a story those same people told themselves. Just like the idea that abortion would not become a major political factor after Dobbs or that Donald Trump would just go away and leave us alone after 2021 were based on stories these people told themselves.

From a sociological standpoint, the rapid convergence on these narratives and their remarkable persistence is a fascinating topic. From a functioning democracy stand, having the discourse shaped by herd mentality and hubris, overseen by people who are frequently wrong but never in doubt is insane.

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Monday, July 29, 2024

Haberman and Swan being suckered by the Trump campaign's failed bluff is the schadenfreude cherry on top

While the New York Times is not as influential as it used to be, it still has a big direct impact and an even bigger indirect impact on the discourse. Along with a handful of other major players such as Politico, it largely sets the narratives that drive the majority of mainstream media coverage. If for no other reason, that makes it important to keep an eye on the paper, particularly when it starts getting just a bit revisionist.

 

One of the most notable and talked about aspects of the aftermath of Biden stepping down was how completely unprepared the Republicans seem to be for what was a widely anticipated turn of events.
From TPM:

It was a cacophony of a reaction from one man, but it’s reflective of the broader response on the far right to Harris becoming the likely Democratic nominee. In the hours after Biden announced that he would withdraw, Republicans from Trump on down flailed for a response. Some Republicans expressed anger, while others were visibly baffled by how to react to the shift. Many reacted by suggesting that the shift from Biden to Harris itself was illegitimate, calling the President’s withdrawal from the race a “coup” and proclaiming that they’re actually running against a system, not a candidate.

Trump’s own communications staff seemed caught off guard. Jason Miller, who has helped helm Trump’s PR apparatus since 2016, announced on NBC on Sunday that he had identified a core Harris vulnerability: “She wants to ban plastic straws.”

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and longtime friend of Trump, appeared to take the cue. In his Sunday evening broadcast, Hannity reminded his audience that Harris had committed to banning the straws, before proclaiming: “I love my plastic straws. I hate paper straws.”

He used that as part of a broader effort during his hour to depict Harris as a far-left radical, as hell-bent on banning the plastic straws cherished by all freedom-loving Americans as she is on joining with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to enslave Americans in “socialized” health care. Harris, Hannity said, co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare-for-All bill.

On the non-straw front, Stephen Miller sputtered to Laura Ingraham Sunday night about the unfairness of it all.

“They held a primary!” Miller nearly shouted. “People – they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”


The messaging was so bad that the Fox news personality Stephen Colbert used to refer to as "not Steve Doocey" actually tried to use a substantial jump in San Francisco conviction rates as part of an attack piece on Harris.

(This, of course, is coming from the same people who argued that Trump's criminal convictions would help him win the black vote.) 

The head-shaking over the lack of GOP preparation wasn't limited to political junkie sites like TPM. It was a topic of conversation across the mainstream media including this segment on CNN from the Monday after. [If you're in a hurry, just watch from the 90 second to two minutes marks.]


"Jonathan Swan and I did a story over the weekend about how the preparations that have been going on, and they've been going on for a while, but they seem unsettled on exactly what message they want to run against her." Listening to Haberman you would get the impression that the New York Times was on top of this from the very beginning. That is not, however, the impression you get reading the actual article.

Trump Campaign Prepares Attack Plan for Harris in Case Biden Withdraws
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Donald J. Trump’s campaign is preparing a major effort to attack Vice President Kamala Harris if President Biden steps aside as the Democratic nominee, including a wave of ads focusing on her record in her current office and in California, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The Trump team has already prepared opposition research books on Ms. Harris, and has similar dossiers on other Democrats who could become the nominee if Mr. Biden were to drop out of the race.

But the bulk of the preparations so far have been focused on Ms. Harris, including a recently concluded poll testing her vulnerabilities in a general election contest, according to the two people. The Trump team’s attention on Ms. Harris is based on its assumption that if Democrats were to bypass the first Black woman to serve as vice president, it would drive even deeper divisions in the party and risk alienating their base of Black voters. 


To be brief and blunt, the Trump campaign knew that they had nothing so they lied to Haberman and Swan everything was good to go in order to buy a little time and keep supporters and donors from panicking. It was a dubious story but the cream of the NYT's political reporting bench swallowed it without an apparent moment of hesitation. Not surprisingly, Josh Marshall had the best takes on this.

 

 

 

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Friday, July 26, 2024

Sixty years ago...

When I said Democrats wanted another 1964, that included a desire for the kind campaign that LBJ ran, unapologetically aggressive and most of all, willing to call a spade a spade. That's one reason why this...

... is a reliable laugh/applause line.

Sixty years ago these ads were playing over broadcast TV and radio at a time when almost everyone was tuned in to these two media. I doubt that any political advertising has had the same cultural impact before or since, particularly this:

"Daisy", sometimes referred to as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl", is an American political advertisement that aired on television as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Though aired only once, it is considered one of the most important factors in Johnson's landslide victory over the Republican Party's candidate, Barry Goldwater, and a turning point in political and advertising history. A partnership between the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency and Tony Schwartz, the "Daisy" advertisement was designed to broadcast Johnson's anti-war and anti-nuclear positions. Goldwater was against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and suggested the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, if necessary. The Johnson campaign used Goldwater's speeches to imply he would wage a nuclear war. 

...

The ad was pulled after its initial broadcast but it continued to be replayed and analyzed by media, including the nightly news, talk shows, and news broadcasting agencies. The Johnson campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, and implying that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. Several other Johnson campaign commercials would attack Goldwater without referring to him by name. Other campaigns have adopted and used the "Daisy" commercial since 1964. 

"Daisy" Ad  September 7, 1964



Telephone Hotline Ad



Which Barry Goldwater?



Ice Cream Ad



Social Security

 

 



Medicare



"Confessions of a Republican"



After Daisy, the most disturbing ad featured images of of a Klan rally and a quote from Robert Creel, grand dragon of the Alabama KKK, listing the targets of his bigotry and ending with his statement of support for Goldwater. Because of the language, it's been pulled from YouTube, but you can watch it here.

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Thursday, July 25, 2024

Nate Silver and Stuart Stevens from 2023

[Gelman addresses some similar points here.]

I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat the timing on this one.


 

Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly, November 24, 2010 [Emphasis added.]

Whatever the outcome of the attorney general's race, it's clear that Steve Cooley led most of the way and then blew it in the final days.

That's because Cooley ran a tentative and complacent campaign. If he loses, and trends suggest he will, it will be thanks to several tactical mistakes, an indifference to stumping for votes, and a gaffe on pensions.

Cooley can also blame Meg Whitman, whose 12-point loss probably sealed his defeat. But the fact remains that he could have won with a more aggressive campaign. Herewith, a post-mortem analysis.

Kamala Harris declared her intention to run for attorney general in the afterglow of the 2008 presidential race. She was a rising star, a member in good standing of Generation Obama. Like the president, she was a biracial candidate who had proven she could attract white votes.

But the glow wore off as Obama's approval ratings dipped, and by the time Steve Cooley entered the race early this year, Harris was all but written off.

She was a San Franisco liberal. She opposed the death penalty. In an anti-Obama year, she was an Obama clone.

Polls consistently showed her trailing Cooley by about five points, though a large chunk of the electorate remained undecided. Conventional wisdom held that he would do well in L.A. County, his home turf, because he was seen as a competent prosecutor, not a partisan Republican.

 

 

The tweet is yet another reminder of how lazy Nate Silver has gotten. He ignores two of the three races cited by Stevens, runs one metric, doesn't bother to look at other equally relevant numbers such as initial position in the polls, completely leaves out important context like campaign spending, the endorsement of the LA Times and the fact that Cooley went into the race as the popular district attorney of LA representing about one in four Californians, as compared with less than one tenth of that represented by Harris as the district attorney of San Francisco. Silver then goes on to draw a sweeping conclusion and adds an LOL just to push the dickishness level over the top.

There is a bit of an analogy here with Harvard's Avi Loeb. Both he and Silver are experts in their fields. Silver knows a great deal about certain aspects of political science while Loeb has done seminal work in astrophysics, but those are both big subjects and it is possible to be highly knowledgeable in parts of those disciplines and completely ignorant of others. Both men have been opining outside of their areas of expertise, and they have been doing so with an entirely inappropriate level of confidence.

This is also a prime example of one of the driving narratives of recent political coverage, hapless Kamala. Along with Trump's followers will abandon him after he loses an election, DeSantis has a lock on the nomination, and Dobbs won't matter, this is one of the stories that has guided journalists over the last four years. By now, two of these have been completely discredited and the other two are looking highly questionable. If you are new to this game, you probably think that being proven this wrong this often would humble Silver and Barro and all the other pundits and big-name reporters who have staked so much of their reputations on these claims, but what we've seen instead is defensiveness, denial, and evermore tortured logic trying to prop up failed arguments.
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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

1964, 1968, 1972, and a bit of 1980

What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my thoughts. I'll go even further and say I think it is true in the advisory sentence: when it tells you to do something, you should probably do it.

1964 was a very good election for the Democrats. 1968 was a bad one and 1972 was a disaster (at least with respect to the presidency). In the broadest sense, how can we characterize 64 versus 68/72?

Skipping a lot of back story, 1964 had a unified Democratic party spend the campaign aggressively attacking an ideologically extreme Republican as dangerous and erratic.

1968 had a divided Democratic Party largely focused on internal squabbles. 1972 took this to the next level, passing over the candidate who actually got the most primary votes for the one who had headed the committee that rewrote the nominating rules.

Like I said, this leaves a lot out, but if we take the analogy at this very high level I think it gets to the gist of what Democrats want and why they feel so angry with and disconnected from much, perhaps most of the elite mainstream media. The response to Kamala Harris clearly suggests they want 2024 to be another 1964, one where a united party concentrates all of its attention, energy, and resources attacking and unfit candidate and his wildly unpopular positions.

By comparison, viewed using this framework, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic have been actively lobbying for what looks a great deal like a combination of 1968 and 1972 with a little bit of 1980 thrown in. Ezra Klein is still whining over the lack of a Eugene McCarthy or a Ted Kennedy this time around.

It is almost impossible to take the arguments of the 68/72 crowd at face value. After months of complaining that Biden was too old and would leave the party divided, now they have a young candidate implicitly chosen by primary voters and currently backed by the near universal support of a reenergized party, and it's driving them crazy. 

Why are they so upset over getting what they claimed to want? I've heard cynics suggest that the editorial boards of papers like the New York Times secretly want Trump to win because he's good for the news business, or because they tend to represent the social class that will benefit from his tax policies, or because they secretly agree with parts of his philosophy. While there is some merit to the first two and perhaps just a little to the third, I don't think that's it. 

I believe they don't want Trump to win, but more importantly, they don't want him to lose in a way that makes them look bad and feel foolish. It is nearly impossible to overstate how invested institutions like the New York Times become in their narratives and how far they will go to defend them. Over the past four years, the standard narratives have been that Trump's support would evaporate once he actually lost an election, that Dobbs would not play a significant role in any upcoming elections, that DeSantis had a virtual lock on the Republican nomination, that JD Vance was the principled conservative and political talent we needed to counter Trump, and that Kamala Harris was an extremely weak politician who could not possibly unite the Democratic Party. Compared to the pain of owning up to all their mistakes, four more years of Trump doesn't seem that bad to these people.









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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

"It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters"

Yesterday morning I posted some thoughts on the elite press's fixation on open primaries under the title, "Straussians* of the Center Left" which concluded with...

There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic option. 

...

What we're seeing is the latest reminder of the long-standing indifference and often open hostility of the elite press, particularly the New York Times, toward the idea of democracy. You can find examples of this going back at least a century or so with the way papers like the NYT covered the rise of fascism in Europe, but the more telling cases are more recent and closer to home. There was virtually no pushback from the mainstream press in 2000 when the Supreme Court installed the candidate lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote as well. We've also seen it in the blasé attitude toward voter suppression.  Since then things have only gotten worse. The disdain for Democratic primary voters has been palpable, culminating with the current enthusiasm for an option that will basically cut actual voters out of the process entirely.

None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times, New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people. This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the surface. 

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall ran a piece that made many of the same points (which if you're writing about politics, is always reassuring). 

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

The Wood article really is jaw-droppingly bad. His ignorance of the history and workings of politics would be embarrassing in a high school newspaper editorial. We'll get back to it if I have the time and the stomach for it.

Back to Marshall.

The point is that beneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.

 

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Monday, July 22, 2024

Straussians* of the Center Left


Democratic voters chose Harris.

While technically there may only be one name on the ballot, when primary voters pull the lever for the incumbent, they know they are voting for a ticket not an individual. They are choosing a candidate and that candidate's successor.

Much to the consternation of the pundits and in direct contradiction of their narrative, Biden and Harris sailed through the primaries with margins similar to that of Obama in 2012. The voter's preference was clear.

This never happened. If it had, you would have never heard of Dean Phillips (instead of just hearing about him and forgetting). It's true that no one wanted to be McCarthy '68, McGovern '72, or Kennedy '80, but that was an individual choice (and probably a good one).

There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic option.

You might, and I want to heavily emphasize the word "might," be able to make some kind of a case for an open convention if we had evidence of a huge groundswell of popular support for the idea, but we appear to be seeing the exact opposite. Based on polling, responses from across the party, and the stunning wave of small donor contributions, it seems that members of the party are (at least by Democratic standards) remarkably unified behind and excited about the successor that they overwhelmingly voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly in 2024. 

What we're seeing is the latest reminder of the long-standing indifference and often open hostility of the elite press, particularly the New York Times, toward the idea of democracy. You can find examples of this going back at least a century or so with the way papers like the NYT covered the rise of fascism in Europe, but the more telling cases are more recent and closer to home. There was virtually no pushback from the mainstream press in 2000 when the Supreme Court installed the candidate lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote as well. We've also seen it in the blasé attitude toward voter suppression.  Since then things have only gotten worse. The disdain for Democratic primary voters has been palpable, culminating with the current enthusiasm for an option that will basically cut actual voters out of the process entirely.

None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times, New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people. This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the surface. 


* I'm using Straussian in the sense of someone who believes in rule by the elite.. That's an overly broad and somewhat sloppy definition, but what you expect from a blog?

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Friday, July 19, 2024

XKCD needs to update this one

Don't get me wrong. This is a great strip.



But Oumuamua's old news. These days everyone's overreacting to Dyson swarms.

(You have to get about halfway through the articles to find out that the researchers have said that these anomalies have more mundane explanations and probably aren't alien mega-structures, but that's not a catchy headline.)

Even Loeb has moved on.


This one has the best punchline.


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Thursday, July 18, 2024

Twelve years ago -- we told you to keep an eye on these guys

 

Weigel Broadcasting is getting a lot of getting a lot deservedly positive press for its launch of MeTV Toons, the company's latest typically classy over-the-air superstation, Arguably the last of the independents in the television industry, Weigel has managed sixteen years of extraordinary growth, brought in consistent profits, and absolutely kicked the asses of most shows from the major studios in terms of viewers with budgets that were one to two orders of magnitude smaller. 

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Two anecdotes on how (and how not) to run a business

I'm going to be discussing both of these businesses in future posts but since my queue is pretty full at the moment I thought I'd get these two examples out while they were still current.

The first involves Weigel Broadcasting, probably the best run business you've never heard of. As with sports and politics, there's an aesthetic pleasure to watching business done well and under that criteria, Weigel is in Joe Montana territory.

Take the response to the death of Andy Griffith on their MeTV network. The network ran a slate of shows featuring Griffith including the Make Room for Daddy back door pilot. Nothing particularly surprising there. I'm sure they plan these in advance and have already laid out the shows they'll air when other notables like Dick Van Dyke or Mary Tyler Moore pass away.

What was notable was the timing. The tribute aired on the Fourth of July. It was an inspired choice -- no living performer was more associated with Americana than Griffith -- but what makes it notable was the fact that Andy Griffith died on July the third.

Let's run through the timeline:

1. Decide on the Fourth

2. Reschedule the day's shows

3. Record the promos

4. Put the promos into heavy rotation

5. Issue press releases.

I've seen simpler corporate processes stretch on for months. At Weigel, this took six hours on the outside. If we had better business journalists, you'd be hearing more about Weigel.

Now for something completely different...

I was checking Hulu last night when I noticed an item about the Dark Knight. I immediately assumed it was something about the shootings (keep in mind, the time you see at the bottom of the screen is West Coast time) but instead it was a jokey piece on fake spoilers. It was still there when I went to bed.








When you get a big, tragic story like this, smart nimble businesses immediately ask themselves if there's a negative PR aspect that they need look out for and if possible, avoid. This is particularly true for websites because

1. it's easy to make changes

2. screen captures are forever.

I suspect that someone at Hulu saw this and thought "we really ought to pull that" but the company wasn't set up for that kind of rapid response. This is also consistent with other things we've seen from Hulu, but that's a topic for other posts.

(also posted at MippyvilleTV)

 

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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Another newly relevant repost -- Hipster Eugenics

[Apologies for going into reruns so heavy this week, but it's another topic people need to be paying attention to this week.]

Concern over the white right people not having enough babies has become one of the main issues bringing together the Silicon Valley Billionaire wing and the redneck wing of the Republican Party together.



Monday, November 21, 2022

Back on the Ithuvania beat -- "Hipster Eugenics"

 


 

 Just to review...

Sometimes, when I come across yet another bit of jaw-dropping flakiness from some tech-bubble billionaire, my thoughts turn to Ithuvania. What if this were an experiment? What if some well-funded research organization decided to see what would happen if it randomly selected individuals of average intelligence, handed them huge checks and told them they were super-geniuses?

I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm just saying the results would have been awfully damned similar.

In his review of the remake of Death Wish, Bob Chipman was talking about the premise of the new version when he stopped and looked around the said, "Y'know, I don't hear anything, but my dog is going nuts."

 If you listen to this article by Julia Black, I'm pretty sure you'll get the same reaction. [emphasis and commentary added]

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. [As has been pointed out numerous times (including this post by Joseph), these nations maintain a growing population though immigration which suggests that these particular pro-natalists have less of an issue with birth rates and more of an issue with which people are being born -- MP] It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen [the honorary dean of Ithuvania -- MP] bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

Google searches for "population collapse" spiked this summer, after Musk continued to raise the issue in response to Insider's report that he'd fathered twins with one of his employees. According to the United Nations, more than a quarter of the world's countries now have pronatalist policies, including infertility-treatment benefits and "baby bonus" cash incentives. Meanwhile, a spate of new assisted reproductive technology startups are attracting big-name investors such as Peter Thiel and Steve Jurvetson [Another charmer -- MP], fueling a global fertility-services market that Research and Markets projects will reach $78.2 billion by 2025.

...

Together [the Collinses] write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel. While they relate to the anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they're wary of affiliating with what they called the "crazy conservatives."  Above all, they are focused on branding pronatalism as hip, socially acceptable, and welcoming [It's the 'welcoming' that makes it truly special -- MP]— especially to certain people. Last year, they cofounded the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org.

...

"We're frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it," Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world." [Boy, that has a familiar ring to it -- MP]

...

It makes sense considering that Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world's highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in "populating the world with his offspring."

...

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

...

The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.

Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.

 

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Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Two years ago at the blog -- didn't expect to be reposting this one quite so soon

Back in 2021, the national press was desperately trying to convince itself that Trump was losing his hold on the Republican Party. This was behind the wishful analytics that launched a thousand "DeSantis is Dominating a Sinking Trump" stories. It was also why journalists and pundits were so eager to believe the obvious con job that was J.D. Vance.

Friday, August 12, 2022

J.D. Vance: David Brooks doing Hee-Haw cosplay

Before we get to Vance, here's a bit of relevant personal history. My grandparents on my father's side had a family farm in the Rio Grande Valley. On my mother's side, my grandparents started out as sharecroppers until World War II gave my grandfather the opportunity to find work as a carpenter. 

I was born in Texas, but when I was five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast before ending up in California. 

I mention this to give you some idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and why I'm so angry with the national press and particularly (as always) the NYT for their role in the sham.

 

 2022 has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.

But it's not just Vance's competence as a candidate that the press got wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie more than the New York Times.

Take a look at Jennifer Senior's 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.

But his profile is misleading. His people — hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view)  [These terms are in no way interchangeable -- MP] — didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class. “Poverty is the family tradition,” he writes. His ancestors and kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers — all low-paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished or offered diminished security.

We start hitting likely embellishments right off the bat. The part of Kentucky Vance's grandparents came from does not and probably did not produce the kinds of cash crops associated with sharecropping. It's possible that Vance's family moved there from more productive land, or it might be he was just adding a flourish to his tale of humble origins. 





Mr. Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio, a now-decaying steel town filled with Kentucky transplants, which at one point included his Mamaw and Papaw — in newscaster English, that’s grandma and grandpa — who moved there shortly after World War II. Though the couple eventually managed to achieve the material comforts of a middle-class life (house, car), they brought their Appalachian values and habits with them. Some were wonderfully positive, like loyalty and love of country. But others, like a tendency toward violence and verbal abuse, were inimical to family life.

Just to emphasize this point, J.D. Vance was born in the suburbs and never lived in rural America (no, summer vacations don't count). His mother was born in those same suburbs. Middletown is a lower middle-class suburb located between Cincinnati and Dayton. While hardly prosperous, it is better off than some of the surrounding area, For instance, the percent of the population below the poverty line in 2020 (back when Vance was living there) was around 9%, roughly half that of nearby Dayton.

As for violence being inimical to family life, Vance is on the record as saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the children, so maybe that's more his thing.
 

Papaw was forever coming home drunk. Mamaw, “a violent nondrunk,” was forever tormenting him, whether by serving him artfully arranged plates of garbage for dinner or dousing him with gasoline. All this guerrilla warfare affected their children. Mr. Vance’s mother was an empress of instability — violent, feckless, prone to hysteria. A long stint in rehab couldn’t shake her addiction to prescription narcotics (she’d later move on to heroin). She spun through more boyfriends than this reader could count and at least five husbands.

The only reason Mr. Vance made it out in one piece is because his grandparents eventually reconciled, becoming his unofficial guardians. (He also spent a terrifically affirming four years in the Marines.) Mamaw was especially encouraging. She was tough as snakeskin, foul-mouthed as a mobster and filled with love. In a town where many children don’t finish high school, she raised a grandson who managed to graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying skyscraping odds.

 

Have to stop for just a minute and  say something about those "skyscraping odds." Besides being purple prose, it was also badly inaccurate.

Ohio State is a good school but it is not (to its credit) particularly exclusive with an acceptance rate of 68%. Furthermore, Vance went to OSU by way of the military, meaning he had a tremendous support network to help him get into college.Vance graduated summa cum laude, so he was clearly hard-working and academically talented, but suburban kid raised by his grandparents graduates high school, joins the Marines, gets into a good university, goes on to get an ivy league law degree is not particularly inspiring. 

I've taught high school in the Delta and in Watts and I can point you to lots of kids who genuinely defied the odds to get where they are. Putting Vance in that group is offensive. 

It's also worth noting that Vance got his opportunities primarily through the GI Bill and the land-grant college system, two landmark progressive programs that Vance's mentor, employer, and political backer Peter Thiel would beat to death with a tire iron given the chance.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” in my mind, divides into two components: the family stories Mr. Vance tells — most of which are no doubt better experienced on the page than they were in real life — and the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes? 

...

Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.

Just to recap. Vance is a Thiel disciple with a history of romanticizing and possibly embellishing his stories. Perhaps we should take that into account when reading his unlikely sounding anecdotes.

Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr. Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.

 Except that Obama is an African-American while Vance is a venture capitalist from the suburbs doing hillbilly cosplay.

None of it mattered, not the sham persona, not the embellished bio, not the association with and dependency on a far-right billionaire so extreme he publicly called women's suffrage a bad idea. Journalists across the country immediately fell in love.

David Brooks got where he is by telling often fabricated anecdotes with a veneer of pop sociology that confirmed his target audience's preconceptions about the class system. Vance took the act to the next level, adding "first-hand" observations and substituting tough love for Brook's "more to be pitied than censured" shtick when discussing the lower classes. Vance also seemed to offer special insight into the rise of Trump, something that had caught the pundit class completely off guard.

 The mainstream press swallowed the obvious fraud because they wanted to believe it.

I feel bad about associating Hee Haw with Vance, so I picked out a few clips to balance things out.

 

 

[I did have three, but YouTube didn't like the third one. -- MP]



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Monday, July 15, 2024

Predictive Models and Black Swans

 Every predictive model relies on at least one of two things. The first is the assumption that patterns and relationships will in the future look basically like they did in the past. The second is first principles, the idea that we have such a trustworthy and complete understanding of how things work that we can say with a high level of confidence that this system or set of conditions will produce this result.

Pretty much the first thing they tell you in any introductory class on regression is the all of the beautiful and deeply reassuring math around confidence about your work assumes that you only draw conclusions about the population your data comes from. When you wander out of the range of observed data, you leave behind that rigorously proven framework.

This is always a problem with predictive models because obviously the future is outside of the range of observed data. We can get around this to a degree by not straying too far, by relying on patterns and relationships that have proven stable over time, and by keeping an eye on things that might cause our models to go haywire. You're still breaking the rules, but you're not getting too far out on the ice.

Models of presidential elections have always been weakly supported both in terms of data and our understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive them. In terms of predictive value, political data always has a sell by date. Just because a particular group reliably voted one way 50 years ago doesn't mean that you can count on them to do the same thing today likewise, polling and elections have changed so much that it makes no sense to aggregate numbers that aren't relatively recent. Take away special cases in outliers, and you can easily find yourself building models on n < 10.

In the 21st century, things have gotten even worse for political scientists. Old relationships are broken down, polling faces serious issues, and pretty much all the elections are outliers on one dimension or another.

Now add in black swans. These events are more or less by definition outside of the range of observed data. You can make math-based statements about their possible aftermath, but I wouldn't say they were based on the discipline of statistics. All you can do under the circumstances is make the most informed guess you can then run the numbers to see what you get.

I won't go so far as to say one guess is as good as another, just that you shouldn't rely too heavily on guesses period.

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Friday, July 12, 2024

This isn't the video where she calls Steven Pinker a dick, but you can't have everything

Finally got around to watching this video by physics post-doc Angela Collier, recommended by frequent commenter David, and I'm giving it a strong recommendation as well, albeit with a caveat or two. It is (as mentioned in David's comment) too long, partly because it could do with some editing, but mainly because it consists of two halves which, though related, might work better as two freestanding videos, both of which would be very good.

The first part is a discussion of what makes a cranck, why otherwise smart and accomplished people can be sucked down the rabbit hole by obsessing over fringe ideas. Collier also talks about how others can do something similar and yet maintain their equilibrium. Her example of the first is Francis G. Perey and his belief that he had disproven Bell's theorem. Her example of the second is Luis Walter Alvarez, who investigated such kook-friendly topics as the JFK assassination, pyramids, and dinosaurs, but rather than damaging his reputation, greatly enhanced it (especially with that last category).

The second part takes a deep dive into the self immolation of Harvard's Avi Loeb, who as regular readers already know, has gone from being one of the world's leading astrophysicists to a crank who sees proof of alien technology pretty much everywhere. Loeb has been a major player in our UFO thread. This video fills in the some missing and particularly damning details.

Collier as posted a number of videos on physics and science journalism. From what I've sampled they're all worthwhile (though, as previously mentioned, a good editor wouldn't hurt).



harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb 




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Thursday, July 11, 2024

YIMBY and the education reform movement -- part one: questions of class and technocracy

I've been thinking about the similarities between the education reform movement we spent so much time discussing a dozen years ago and the YIMBY movement we've been focusing on for the past few years. I had originally intended on doing a medium length post on the subject, but the more I think about it the more I realize it's going to take more than one trip.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the education reform movement was a bunch of management consultants and rich white and Asian people swooping in to show poor black and Hispanic people how things were done, but that would capture a great deal of what was going on back during the height of the movement. This was nowhere more obvious than with Teach for America, a tiny but wildly overhyped program that took kids from elite colleges, gave them a crash course in teacher prep, then dumped them in the classroom with highly mixed results.

The hagiographic coverage that TFA teachers got at a time when career educators in genuinely tough urban and rural schools were being routinely demonized was more than a little contradictory, but it made perfect sense when you remembered two things. First, around the turn of the millennium, the education reform movement's worldview was the standard narrative, so widely and unquestioningly accepted by the press that editors who would reflexively both-sides even the clearest of issues would give reform advocates a free pass to say anything they wanted unchallenged. Second, the upper echelons of journalism are disproportionately made up of the children of elite families. It's not that surprising that alumni of Ivy League universities will be more impressed by a rich kid who chooses to do a two year stint teaching in Inglewood than they are by poor kids who go to state schools then choose to devote their lives teaching their communities. It's sad, but it's not surprising.

Class and economic status play a different role in the YIMBY movement, but not that different. In both cases, the world is viewed predominantly through a six or seven figure lens. Much of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate comes down to old money versus nouveau riche, the "we were here first crowd" versus the "we've got the money why can't we live by the beach?" crowd.

In terms of coverage and rhetoric, the focus of the housing discourse is completely dominated by a handful of enclaves for the rich. The plurality of American housing stories are about a wealthy, medium-sized (17th largest by population) urban exurb that is unique to the point of being an outlier along so many dimensions that many researchers avoid using it as an example. Here in Southern California you are more likely to find a discussion of the tiny postage stamps of Santa Monica and Venice than about all of East LA. Even the housing crisis of the Central Valley was largely ignored until someone came up with the bright idea of pushing the narrative that the explosion in prices was caused by rich tech bros moving to Bakersfield. (Quick side note. This is and always has been bullshit. Bakersfield is not a town that is going to attract the wealthy and trendy, particularly not in a time of global warming. I'd argue that they don't know what they're missing. Like the late Jonathan Gold, I'm very fond of the town, but even I wouldn't want to spend August there.)

Not only are poor and lower middle class people underrepresented in the YIMBY movement, there is considerable tension between the movement and those housing advocates who primarily come from and speak for people below the median income line. There are sharp divides over issues such as rent control, public housing, vacancy rates, and the trustworthiness of developers. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong on each of these issues (though, for the record, I tend to favor the YIMBY positions within reason). The point is that the movement's perspective is one of successful people, economists, and developers. There's nothing wrong with that perspective, but they don't speak for everyone.

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Wednesday, July 10, 2024

This isn't a post about politics; it's a post about the poitical press.

Even more than usual, the best political commentary over the past few days has been coming from Josh Marshall. Though I want to wait until the dust settles before weighing in on the politics and political journalism of the moment (taking a pause in times of confusion is a good policy in general), I did want to break into our regularly scheduled programming to highlight a few recent observations from Marshall.

[Emphasis added.]

 One of the reasons for that shift was simply that Biden was still there. He’s still running and still the nominee. We’re in the midst of a level of feeding frenzy I’ve only seen twice as a political observer — the first week of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998 and the one that ended Al Franken’s career in the Senate in 2018. The Washington press corps and national political press overwhelmingly and vociferously want to force Biden out of the race. I don’t say that in the sense of bias, per se — it’s not even necessarily at the level of intentionality. It’s more at the level of crowd behavior. It’s just how these feeding frenzies work. What do foxes think they’re doing when they rip through a hen house? For the DC press, this is all mixed in with ego and a sense of vindication. But again, it’s just how feeding frenzies work. But at a certain point, the feeding frenzy has been churning for days and Biden’s still running and there’s some element of a wave cresting. Like, hey we’ve been telling you all the reasons why Biden has to withdraw from the race for days but he’s still running and okay, well, maybe not — or, like, we can’t keep up this 100 yard dash forever. It’s just a cresting pattern.

At the same time I think there were the first hints of a realization that this has been overwhelmingly a conversation among media and political elites without much focus or knowledge about anything average voters are thinking or doing. My point here isn’t that average voters are necessarily rising up in defense of Joe Biden. More that no one really has any idea what most voters are thinking. And of course there is no “average voter.” It’s a big country with lots of different kinds of people. My point is simply that the elite conversation had already arrived at a consensus and blown right past it without any real idea of what the rest of the country was thinking.

This was captured for me by a couple interviews with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D) of Michigan. At the beginning of the week she appeared on TV demanding Biden solve the situation or move on, appear on camera with various feats of cognitive strength, etc. We’re running out of time, etc. Then, a couple days later, she described spending time back in her district and getting approached by ordinary voters saying, Debbie, what are you talking about? We had a primary and we voted for Biden. What’s going on here? It wasn’t so much a dead-end defense of Biden as a reality check that what was happening in DC was pretty different from what was happening at home. And, again, not absolute resistance, as she seemed to put it, more just, “hold on a second, what are we talking about here?” After that she’s shifted to a more equivocal stance, mainly saying we need to find a way to get back to bashing Donald Trump.


Before we get down into the weeds, we need to acknowledge maybe the most obvious point: Clinton in '98; Franken in 2018; Biden in 2024. I might need to check Wikipedia to make sure, but I'm reasonably certain all three of those politicians were Democrats. To find a comparable case with Republican, you probably need to go back 50 years to the presidency of Richard Nixon. For a particularly informative point of comparison, this is not the first time we have seen an incumbent president who has battled rumors about age and decline stumble in an initial debate, but this is the first time the New Yorker has responded by suggesting we consider the 25th amendment. [Emphasis added.]

Despite trailing far behind Reagan in the polls leading up to the debate, Mondale exceeded expectations and emerged as the clear winner of the first debate. According to a Newsweek/Gallup poll, 54 percent of debate-watchers favored Mondale, while only 35 percent sided with Reagan. President Reagan was perceived as confused and tired during the debate, whereas Mondale demonstrated articulate communication. This praised performance briefly revitalized the Mondale campaign, narrowing Reagan's lead in the polls by seven points.

This is not to suggest that the establishment press is biased against Democrats, at least not in the conventional sense, but that's the way it plays out in practice. Decades of working the ref now totally internalized. A profoundly flawed of journalistic ethics. Republican skill at messaging and setting the agenda. Probably most of all a herd mentality so powerful that lockstep is almost unavoidable while independent thought is vanishingly rare.

The use of the terms 'ego' and 'vindication' are extraordinarily insightful on Marshall's part. If you go back through the interviews and memoirs of editors and publisher of the New York Times (which generally speaks for the establishment press), you will see a great deal of regret over coming off badly, over being wrong, but virtually no regret over decisions like teaming with Steve Bannon or giving heavy coverage to leaks which everyone in the newsroom knew were part of a Kremlin operation to influence the election.

We know this about the NYT newsroom because one reporter, Amy Chozick , has stepped up and acknowledged her role in the election of Trump. As far as I know, no editor with the paper has done the same.

It is difficult to overstate how humiliating the past decade has been for the establishment press going all the way back to 2015 when the standard narrative was that Donald Trump could never get the Republican nomination. Since then, the narrative has been that there was no way for Trump to beat DeSantis, Dobbs would not be a big deal in the upcoming elections, inflation and Biden's unpopularity would devastate the Democrats in the midterm, Gaza would continue to grow as a political issue, "sure, abortion was a big deal in the midterms, the people are starting to forget about it," Biden would never catch up with Trump in the polls.

(I was tempted to mention how the New York Times called the Russian military lean and lethal at the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you know me, I hate to pile up on.)

The establishment press and most of all the New York Times hates to be embarrassed. I'm not talking about normal levels of aversion. I mean they genuinely hate it. The idea that this is the best paper in the nation is fundamental to its culture and to the sense of identity of many who work there. Self-congratulation has become a verbal tic for these poeple. They don't even hear themselves doing it anymore.

Whenever the press does something that seems to undermine its presumed political leanings, ask yourself "does this make them look good?" Case in point, within days of the decision, the New York Times and Politico jumped on the narrative that Dobbs wouldn't matter and they have been trying to shore it up ever since. Recently, the NYT has been pushing the idea that Donald Trump has successfully pivoted to the center on reproductive rights and have downplayed or failed to mention entirely tons of conflicting evidence such as Trump continuing to brag about overturning Roe V Wade or telling increasingly fantastic stories about infanticide in blue states. The New York Times is clearly a pro-choice paper, but it's safe to say that they care more about not being caught in a mistake than they do about women's lives.

One more point. Politicians and the press corps have always had an insular and incestuous relationship. In the Internet age it has only got worse. This has led not only to a growing disconnect between those in the bubble and those outside of it; it has led to a dunning Kruger effect around that disconnect. They don't know how little they know, which is one of the reasons why their response to the 2016 election was to put pith helmets on their reporters and send them to the diners of middle America.

Back in 1998, just as the feeding frenzy was cresting, you would see journalists and pundits confused, even stunned, at how little the rest of America cared about an extramarital affair. They would shake their heads and ask what were people thinking, not even considering the possibility that it was they and not everyone else who were going crazy.

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