Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Michael C. Bender is basically a Theodore H. White A.I.

[I wrote this before the events in Springfield, but I think this piece has aged considerably better than Bender's so I'm running it as is.]

One of the signs of dysfunctional organization is that incompetent people thrive as long as they are adept at being wrong in the right way. Case in point, Michael C. Bender, perhaps the NYT's most spinnable journalist, who was last on our radar assuring us that DeSantis was dominating Trump in the early race for the nomination, and is now the paper's point man for J.D. Vance.

There is no temptation that Bender does not succumb to in these articles: the desire of an embedded journalist to depict their subject in the best possible light; the fear of deviating from what their bosses want to hear; the pull of lazy writing;  convenient credulity; narrative writing in the worst possible sense, hackneyed and distorted, complete with dusty cliches ("folksy tales about his hardscrabble upbringing," which not only is this painfully clichéd prose, it isn't even particularly accurate.)

Here's a taste.

 [Emphasis added... frequently.]

The in-flight candidate is, in many ways, a useful metaphor for the moment: a gifted yet fledgling political talent — whose calling card is his connection to the working class — adjusting to a new life with his own chartered Boeing 737 as the newly minted member of a Republican ticket headed by a three-time presidential contender.

Bit of context. The NYT was an early investor in the Vance narrative. He was the MAGA whisperer, the sensible conservative who could talk to Trump supporters because he was one of them. It was the Paul Ryan effect squared. The establishment press so wanted to believe in a sensible Republican to lead the party out of the craziness that they turned a blind eye to all the conflicting evidence. Not coincidentally, two years go Bender was writing articles arguing that Ron DeSantis was a remarkably gifted politician.

The talented Mr. Vance story is still a thing in the NYT despite having even less supporting evidence than the DeSantis narrative.

A bit later, we get this gem reported without comment and, in the context of the rest of the article, apparently taken at face value.

“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” said Steve Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.
Of course, Cheung is lying. The claim doesn't even pass the laugh test. No candidate since the introduction of approval polling has ever been happy with a running mate who got Vance-level numbers. You might expect to back off from the "this is fine" spin before they hit NYT Pitchbot territory ...

Instead they chose to double down.

JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump

By Michael C. Bender

[And before you ask, no, this is not one of those good stories with bad headlines we've been talking about. If anything, the actual article is worse, starting with the first sentence.]

Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.

The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.

A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.

The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.

Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.

And it just goes on like that, a bad pastiche of the Making of the President (a book that was never that good to begin with). Take a look at Nora Ephron's brilliant satiric essay on White's books.


And here's the opening paragraphs of Bender's earlier article:

Senator JD Vance was unsure where to stand or where to put his hands.

With a fresh haircut and a closely tailored blue suit on his first day of solo campaigning as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Vance walked to the back of his chartered airliner to chat with reporters on Monday. Briefly uncertain of how to start, he furrowed his brow and looked from side to side.

In addition to the banality, these details and the tone are often wildly at odds with the impressions of most observers.

Mr. Vance’s excitement at joining the fray was immediately visible. He arrived with a fresh haircut and neatly trimmed beard for his first solo rally, a hometown event in Middletown, Ohio. In a sign of his astonishment at every warm welcome from his pro-Trump crowds, Mr. Vance opened each event for the first several weeks with the same single exclamation: “Wow!"


Nothing in this paragraph lines up with the clips we've seen from the campaign trail featuring a stiff candidate speaking to often tiny crowds and trying to come off as normal while putting on a brave face.


J.D. Vance Blames Staff for Disastrous Doughnut-Shop Visit is not a headline a campaign likes to see.

Vance even managed to screw up perhaps the softest of all softball questions in all politics.

As one tweet put it: "If this guy were a country his top domestic export would be steppable rakes."

It's possible that these moments are unrepresentative and if so, it would be perfectly appropriate for Bender to address that in the article, but this is just a campaign trying to wish away bad news and a New York Times reporter going along. 

That sense of reading a story about an entirely different race is sharpest when it gets to the reaction of the other side.

Democrats, however, have been outraged and confounded by Mr. Vance’s vice-presidential bid. This year, Mr. Trump had spoken at length about finding a running mate who was uniquely qualified to take over as president — and then picked Mr. Vance, who assumed his first elected office just last year and turned 40 less than a month ago.

While it's true, Democrats are outraged by many of Vance's positions, the general reaction from a strategic point of view has been celebratory -- they generally view Trump's choice as disastrous -- and while those celebrations may prove premature, the polling so far seems to support their assessment.

The word "confounded" is an even more curious choice. No one at the Harris campaign seems confused by how to deal with him. Her digital team has produced a steady stream of spots that consist of nothing more than a choice quote and an accompanying video clip.

 Of course, Vance could yet surprise his critics -- it's always a bad idea to predict a career based on a debut -- but if you're going to make a counterintuitive argument you have to actually argue your points, not simply pretend that they are true. The data, overwhelming anecdotal evidence, and common sense  suggest that he is not a gifted politician, that he is not generating significant support even within the MAGA base, and that many in the Trump organization (quite possibly most) regret their impulsive choice. 

I don't know these things are true but if you're going to push a narrative about a remarkable young talent who's charming the masses and impressing everyone around him, you need to at least acknowledge the obvious.

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