Politicians and Pundits Being Obviously and Gratuitously Wrong (with a mild defense of Hillary Clinton)

Trust me, this column will address the Democrats' vice presidential pick and other recent news.  In a related context, I will also discuss how Hillary Clinton is for some reason being sideswiped in an especially ridiculous way.  It is first necessary to describe the background for some recent political stories, but patient readers will be rewarded.

One of the most surprising and disappointing moments as children become adults is when they discover that grownups are, to be blunt, kinda dumb.  Sometimes, not even kinda.  In the political arena, the adults who dominate the national discussion do so for decades, and until I was in my twenties, I continued to believe that those people were at least smart, if not affirmatively insightful.  Soon however, it became impossible to ignore the profound emptiness of the supposedly super-smart guys who opined on politics, with William F. Buckley and George Fwill being the two most obvious examples of poseurs who had inexplicably convinced gullible people of their brilliance.

Many pundits are former politicians or former staffers of politicians, which makes it clear that the people running the country are often not particularly bright.  Why does this continue ad infinitum?  Because mediocrity (or worse) is not punished.  The people who make the decisions about who becomes a pundit are picking people who think like them, which means that groupthink and a commitment to the conventional wisdom are prized above all.

The people who occupy spaces in the punditsphere are often journalists who Peter Principled their way into a cushy gig.  Other times, they are people who had one notable thing on their resume and milked it for all it was worth.  "Genius" political operatives fall into that category, where the political version of hitting a lucky hole-in-one can make a person's career.  Former pollster Patrick Caddell was over-credited with Jimmy Carter's 1976 successful run for the presidency, and although it is impossible to say that Caddell never said or wrote a smart thing in his life, the fact was that he was given a respectful hearing for decades after his use-by date.

And this brings us to the current moment, with the pundits of the world weighing in on Vice President Kamala Harris's choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.  Even though I continue to believe that there is no way Republicans will be stopped from installing Trump in the White House in January (voting results be damned), I was as interested as anyone in the discussions about who Harris would choose.  I also saw no reason to disagree with the consensus that she had many good options and no bad choices.  For what it might be worth, I am a huge fan of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, but she ruled herself out of the running.

A conventional wisdom soon emerged that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was the "obviously right choice," because Pennsylvania is possibly the most important state on the Electoral College map that Harris faces.  Shapiro is quite popular at home, he speaks well, he is young and dynamic, and he looks good without looking inauthentic.  Again, no bad choices.

Sometimes, however, people can inadvertently make it easy to choose.  The Clinton-era equivalent of Carter strategist Pat Caddell is Mark Penn, who has been cashing in on his version of the boy-political-genius label ever since he was a pollster for Bill Clinton in the 1990's.  Most infamously, Penn later proved to be an anti-genius by managing Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign so ineptly (yet arrogantly) that she lost to a political unknown with a foreign-sounding name.  When she showed the good sense not to hire him again in 2016, Penn became huffy and, according to his Wikipedia page, "later became a defender of Donald Trump, opposing his impeachment, consulting on his 2020 presidential campaign, and alleging a 'deep state' conspiracy against him."

Why bring up Penn now?  Even though Penn 2018 was "sounding Trumpy," he and others somehow continue to believe that people in the Democratic Party should respect his opinion.  And because the major op-ed pages consider themselves a safe space for political "names," Penn was given a guest slot in The New York Times last week to argue that Harris should choose Shapiro.  Why?   Penn wrote:

Mr. Shapiro, who is unpopular with many progressives over energy policy, school choice and other issues, would send a signal that Ms. Harris is not captive to the left and that she puts experience ahead of ideology. Choosing him would add an experienced governor from a swing state who could appeal to many moderate Democrats, independents and some Nikki Haley voters on a multitude of key issues. He would provide balance to the ticket and underscore that there is a place for moderates in today’s Democratic Party.

Penn, of course, is one of the people most responsible for the Clinton/Gore "triangulation" strategy of running against fellow Democrats for being too far left, which simply announced to voters that even Democrats did not like Democrats.  Penn and his ilk are the reason that former Governor Howard Dean felt the need to defend "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."  The Penn move is always, always to tell politicians to move to the right.

Again, that "worked" in 1992, at least in the sense that Clinton won an election with a huge assist from Ross Perot's third-party candidacy.  Whether Penn's insistently right-pulling strategy was in fact a necessary condition for that win is dubious, but such is the way that reputations are made in the US politician-pundit industrial complex.  Either way, Penn has been consistently and disastrously wrong ever since, as President Hillary Clinton can attest.

From my standpoint, Penn did the world a huge favor by revealing who we should oppose.  I hate to simplify the world so completely, but there is a fairly safe default rule: If Mark Penn is for it, it is best to be against it (for both moral and strategic reasons).  In any event, I had liked a lot of what I saw about Shapiro, but suddenly there was a clearly bad choice.  I should say that the policies that Penn noted that make Shapiro "moderate" are in fact bad, but even without getting into all of that, "I'm against whatever he's for" is a safe rule for some people.

Coincidentally, Pennsylvania's former Governor Ed Rendell (who served from 2003 through 2011) is another Democrat who fancies himself a realist but who spends his time bashing progressives, as I discussed five years ago when he dishonestly attacked Senator Elizabeth Warren as "a hypocrite."  Moreover, although Penn is among the very worst and Rendell is reliably hackish, the supposedly left-leaning punditocracy is chock full of people who make embarrassingly bad arguments and cannot resist snark for snark's sake.

One example is Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who once absurdly attacked Bernie Sanders for being "unsmiling" and "a Trump of the left."  More recently, even after he had correctly argued that Biden was being selfishly obstinate, Milbank either forgot his own position or simply could not stop himself from saying this: "The heavy-handed attempt to force Biden to quit the race after his disastrous debate has, predictably, backfired. Biden has dug in, pitting 'elites' against the people. Democrats are fighting among themselves. George Clooney is diagnosing Biden’s mental competence (he played Dr. Doug Ross on 'ER,' after all)."  Good call!  Yes, the Democrats are in much worse shape today than they were on July 11.  Clooney should never have described honestly what he observed at a Biden fundraiser.  That is top quality punditry.

Like Milbank, MSNBC's Joy Reid lost her mind in trying to defend Biden, as I noted in a Verdict column last month.  An especially insane part of her angry rant was when she scolded "privileged, rich white elected Democrats" for being "scared for your own seats ... . I mean, you’re the most important thing here, right? You, and your donors, of course.  Not the actual voters in your party base."  What would cause a Democratic "thought leader" like Reid to think that Democrats who are worried about losing seats in the House of Representatives are being selfish and are merely defending their donors.  If those Democrats lose their seats, the Democrats will not retake the House.  Where would the party's base be then?

In part, I suppose that there is a simple imperative among the Milbanks and Reids of the world to fill newspaper space or air time, even when they have nothing to say.  They are like students frantically writing assigned papers with minimum word limits, and in a pinch, anything goes.  The fact is, however, that neither Milbank nor Reid nor Rendell are generally bad.  Penn is terrible, but these others are not stupid, and they generally seem to have admirable motivations.  The problem is that they are given a platform and are treated as serious thinkers, but they are capable of writing and saying damaging nonsense.

Where does Hillary Clinton fit into all of this?  One of the factors that elevated Walz in the public discussion was his inspired use of "weird" to describe Republicans.  This led to some navel-gazing among pundits, some of whom said that Walz trivialized the threat of Trump, whereas others said that he had put the Republicans on their heels.  Maybe that disagreement is honest and not a matter of some pundits feeling the need to take a contrarian (or even panicky) position on the issue of the day.  In any case, that kind of low-level disagreement is simply par for the course.

What should not be normal is for non-Republicans -- and I include here Democrats and people who claim to be writing in a nonpartisan or non-ideological way -- to suddenly use this as a moment to attack Hillary Clinton.  Yet they did.  I saw tossed-off anti-Clinton comments more than a few times, including one claim that "deplorables" was "the insult Ms. Clinton infamously used to describe Mr. Trump’s supporters."

I was sincerely surprised to see an even clearer example of this baseless attack in Ezra Klein's column this past Saturday.  Klein asked whether "there [is] a risk of [the 'weird' meme] falling into something that can bedevil Democrats, coming off as an insult to Trump’s supporters, like Hillary Clinton’s 'deplorables' comment in 2016."  The latter part of that same column included an edited interview with Walz, and Klein posed one question this way: "[O]ne of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?"

So other than assert blithely that "the liberal personality" includes "contempt" and "smugness" that Democrats might blurt out at any moment, the claim is that Clinton insulted "Trump's supporters" by calling them that terrible, terrible thing.  The fact, however, is that Clinton did not call "Trump supporters" deplorables.  She said, quite reasonably, that some of them are terrible people.  Was she wrong about that?  Of course not.  Watch any Trump rally and note, say, the laughter about the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi's husband.  How is a person who thinks that is funny anything but deplorable?

The essential point, however, is that Clinton was making a genuinely thoughtful argument.  These were her words:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. ...  Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket—and I know this because I see friends from all over America here—I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas—as well as, you know, New York and California—but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

What a monster, eh?  What smugness, what contempt for non-elites she "let slip" on that fateful day!

To be clear, I was never a Hillary Clinton fan.  She was a happy triangulator, and even when I supported her in the 2016 general election, I did so knowing that she would often disappoint everyone except Mark Penn and Ed Rendell.  Anyone who ever sought out Henry Kissinger's advice on anything is deeply problematic.  Even this year, the famous former student activist smugly criticized student protesters, saying that "[t]hey don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”   Damn kids!  At that point, she offered a misleading history lesson about the Middle East that blamed only one side for the failed peace process in the 1990's.

Again, I have no reason to exalt the non-despicable half of the Clinton marriage.  The point is not to defend her career but to make clear how lazy and self-defeating it is to grab onto these falsehoods and reinforce them -- especially when there is no obvious gain from doing so.  Why did Klein, for example, feel the need to go there?  He could have asked Walz a simple question: "Is there a downside to the 'weird' framing, such as making Democrats seem dismissive?"  But no, it was: "Why isn't what you're doing the same as that terrible thing that Hillary Clinton said?"  Even though she never said it!  If anything, she low-balled the fraction of Trump's supporters who were beyond reach, but she never said that "Trump's supporters" as a whole were deplorable.  She in fact said the opposite of that, and she wanted to figure out how to reach those who could be reached.

Does any of this matter?  I think it does.  This is all of a piece with the low quality of political advice and critique that have been on display in the US seemingly forever.  Milbank snarks about something that Clooney -- who is on his side -- said.  Reid sneers at the people who she should want to win their elections.  Klein and others flay themselves by confessing that they are ashamed of the "liberal personality."  Even when the Democratic presidential ticket has brought back excitement to the party, we are told to remember that Hillary was a stupid meanie.

So-called defensive crouch liberalism was mostly about substantive policy issues, where the triangulating crowd tried to hide from the supposed "inherent conservatism" of American voters.  For decades, however, large majorities of voters have agreed with genuinely liberal Democrats on issue after issue.  Even so, too many people in the center and left continue to act as if they need to say, "Well, I know we sorta suck, but ..."  And then they wonder why people are turned off.