Bruni's anatomy of political journalism is a stick-figure drawing

This morning the NYT's Frank Bruni pens one of those mawkish, pretentiously high-minded confessions that's intended to show a professional devotion to the "big political picture," but alas it turns on the columnist and instead reveals a certain cluelessness. "We play petty games and barrel down pointless roads," he writes of himself and his fellow vigilante journalists, which is often true. Yet, in reality, three examples he gives to prove his often true-enough point merely gainsay it. To wit,

You would think, from our rapt (and sometimes rabid) attention to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, that candidates face some sort of mathematical, structural imperative to wow voters there, and that these two states are nonpareil mirrors of the country.

Is that really their significance — especially Iowa's? Or is the significance of the early states (which include South Carolina) more that of a test — especially for Republicans — of the candidates' willingness to sell to the activist fringe whatever soul they have left? One should fold CPAC, and political journalists' coverage of it, into the question. It too is a spectacle of flamboyant lunacy which we properly observe for signs of hopelessly sociopathic behavior. As such, Iowa, CPAC, etc., are just "mirrors" of those who would be king.

Bruni also complains:

When someone on the fringes of both the race and serious discourse says something clownish that’s a cry to be noticed, ignore it. This means quitting our addiction to Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, no matter how good they are for readership, ratings and belly laughs.

I'm sympathetic to this view, indeed so sympathetic I keep at a minimum my own Trump-o-grams and the like. But I do so at a genuine peril to my own writing, and perhaps as a disservice to you. When a political party is not merely fringed by its Trumps and Palins but in sum defined by its Louie Gohmerts, Mo Brookses, Virginia Foxxes, Paul Ryans, Ted Cruzes, Rand Pauls, James Inhofes, Ben Carsons, Mike Huckabees, Rick Perrys and on and on, as well as their Limbaughs and Ingrahams and Hannitys, well, then, we all have a problem. How, or rather why, should we ignore the GOP's characterological clownishness?

Finally, Bruni laments:

We look foolish when we’re wrong. After Walker’s supposed bungling of the Obama-Christian question, he went up in one national poll. Sometimes a dodge is just a dodge and a gaffe not much of a gaffe.

There was no supposed bungling by Walker on the religious question, which his party's few adults promptly condemned. Rather, his remarks were a vital indication that this particular clown among professional clowns is still stuck in amateur status and quite likely to repeat some truly spectacular, over-the-top bungling, which, sure enough, Walker soon did. His subsequent claims of Midwest protesters-as-ISIS and that President Reagan's union-busting was "the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime" — and that "Years later, [Soviet] documents" proved it, which Reagan's ambassador to the USSR has called "utter nonsense" — were but crackpot comments on the periphery even of fringe. Maybe Bruni didn't see it coming — but that's Bruni's problem, not political journalism's.

None of this is to deny that many political writers — think Ron Fournier — are obsessed with pettiness, pointlessness and shallowness, or that ratings and pageview whorishness doesn't too often prevail. Bruni's examples, however, suggest quite the opposite; there's a depth to them that he overlooked.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

I wonder if Bruni imagines that if journalists,who are a negligible source of opinion these days, ignore the likes of Palin, the activist fringe of the Republican party will too. And/or change their opinion owing to the lack of coverage? And will the sober Republican politicians, presuming such exist, cease to fear these primary controlling nutty buddies and rise to the occasion to articulate more moderate and responsible old school Republican ideals? Pardon me for a nonce while I gasp out my derisive belly laughs.

No Frank, that's not how it works.