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.