When silly meets predictable

August 26, 2007

When a rock band’s creativity grows stale, their songs become formulaic. They take an old hit, change the key, alter the lyrics a little, and voila. A new single.

When a newspaper columnist’s creativity grows stale, the same problem emerges. Take David Broder, for example, who’s been having a rough year. The formula is surprisingly straightforward: praise a politician who seems to break with a party’s orthodoxy, throw in some kind words for Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, allude to “post-partisan” politics, and express some disdain for “politics as usual,” and presto — another gem from the “dean” of the DC media establishment.

Today’s piece fits the mold.

Today, that tide may be carrying him away from his Republican Party and toward a third-party or independent ticket with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — a development that could reshape the dynamics of the 2008 presidential race.

Next month, Hagel will make a threshold decision — whether to run for a third term in the Senate. He gave me no definitive answer, but my guess is that he will say that 12 years of battling the institutional lethargy of Capitol Hill will be enough. Certainly he is under no illusions about how much he can achieve as one of 100 lawmakers.

On the contrary, while Washington is gridlocked in partisan battle between two equally spent parties, the country is moving rapidly, he thinks, to the conclusion that neither Republicans nor Democrats have the answers to the problems people see.

What a coincidence; Hagel seems to embrace the exact same belief that Broder has been writing about in practically all of his columns.

Broder seems to believe that a Bloomberg-Hagel ticket would meet some pressing national demand. Do they agree with one another on policy matters? Well, no. Do they have a shared vision on how government is supposed to work? Strike two. Does Broder see a scenario by which these two can win a national election? Not so much.

But, Broder says, they have “leadership” qualities. I wish I knew what Broder means by this; unfortunately, his column doesn’t tell me. It apparently has something to do with “national purpose,” though this, too, is just another vague platitude.

The column reads like a daydream of a writer who believes a liberal independent and a very conservative Republican will join forces, solve all of our problems, and “get something done.” Get what done? It doesn’t matter; it’ll be something.

How, exactly, is Broder able to keep his job if all of his columns are the same?

“change the key, alter the lyrics a little, and voila. A new single.”

Hey, that’s my MO!

“How, exactly, is Broder able to keep his job if all of his columns are the same?”

Easy. Same reason how many popular shows remain on the air. Predictability and comforting the audience. His job, it seems, is to stoke the fires of the idealists and distract them with his whimsy.

Personally, I think it would do the US some good to have a 3rd party, but it should start off small like say aiming to win a govenorship or house seat (and not elect an ex-wrestler.) Then start completing in various states and districts. Elect a few senators and then take a run at prez. You need infrastruture and national presence instead of a myth. Most of the 3rd party discussions center around a cult of personality around certain folks aimed at the brass ring. We’ve seen how well that works…

  • Used in this context, words like “leadership” and “national purpose” allow a reader who is not critically engaged to insert his or her own meaning. They can be used to slip past the discriminating faculty. The uncritical reader then nods his or her head in agreement and the begins to form an opinion. I understand that this sort of thing is done quite a lot in sales and in hypnosis. Perhaps the “dean” keeps his job because he’s doing his job.

  • ***…another gem from the “spleen” of the DC media establishment….***

    Are we talking about that incredulous “Unity08” thing again here? The all-talk, no-walk party? The illegitimate step-spawn of the not-so-Greens? The only thing that’s expected to do is to syphon off the disgruntled Republicans who are going to bolt and vote Dem in ’08, and deflect that portion of the BlueDog Dems who won’t vote GOP.

    Broder is still a solid, quasi-psychophantic inhabitant of Fortress Rove—and this madness has Rove written all over it

  • “change the key, alter the lyrics a little, and voila. A new single.”
    Hey, that’s my MO! — FormerDan

    Okay, but your creativity is never stale!

    As to why Broder why and so many others write as they do…
    Some of may just be laziness — they’ve lost the fire they once had when they were young and hungry and idealistically in pursuit of some truth. Some are so self-absorbed with their own importance and the depth of their accumulated wisdom they don’t look outside themselves. Some are obviously ass-kissers. Others just keep hammering away to prove their points or justify past positions.

    Whatever the motivation, there’s no excuse for their continued employment in any organization that claims to do responsible reporting.

    “I read the news today, oh, boy…”

  • The formula is surprisingly straightforward: praise a politician who seems to break with a party’s orthodoxy, throw in some kind words for Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, allude to “post-partisan” politics, and express some disdain for “politics as usual,” and presto —

    Well, he’s not the only one who serves us up this recipe once in a while, right? I agree with 1 and 3 that most MSM talk about third parties is, strangely, about how to go about it in the totally wrong way, that will only defeat the populist political interests that are supposedly going to be vindicated by the party, and also I agree that this recipe is an animal of that species. People just have to start to talk about it in the terms I just used, because all the talk about third parties is too confusing. We need to cut through the blather.

  • I agree with 1 and 3 that most MSM talk about third parties is, strangely, about how to go about it in the totally wrong way,

    That is, they hype it up like it’s going to save us all, but the efforts they push are not designed to be effective, given the institutional hindrances on third parties in America (long story short: because of how American elections are run and how American legislatures are constituted, it’s very difficult for there to be more than two successful parties in American politics, and it’s extremely difficult for a third party to get started and become nationally successful- and this is something every undergrad political science student learns about). To really be successful, they’d have to do it the way Former Dan describes.

  • Alright, just one more comment on this one:

    I know that half of my poli-sci professors, if they read my previous comments, would suggest the possibility of there being a pressing, unmet need among the national electorate, one that the two major parties were adamant against satisfying even a smidge, even as it came closer and closer to Election Day. And I agree that in that scenario, a third party could be, out of nowhere, nationally successful, although it hadn’t built up its reputation with the voters in a host of easier-to-win-for-a-new-party, smaller elections around the country, first. But, even though this is what Broder and the others are trying to make it sound like is going on, I didn’t mention it, because it’s a totally unusual scenario, and is not actually happening, and this website deals with practical politics, not with hypothetical questions that are only of interest to an academic political science course.

    I just had to come back here and cover my bases, because one of my principal peeves is the epidemic of academics in all kinds of fields who erroneously think they are smarter than all kinds of people, because most people common-sensically don’t acknowledge merely theoretical, or totally pedantic, points about some question pertaining to the discipline in practical contexts where acknowledging that point doesn’t even make sense. Then they try to sell you on how much smarter they are than you, when listening to their advice all the time in a practical situation would get you wasting your time half the time you were talking to them. In my experience, about half the time an academic complains about how stupid a common misconception about an issue in their field is, or how stupid a guess lay people often make about such an issue is, the academic is right to complain. The other half the time, the academics are not even thinking about why the lay people are giving the answer they are giving, or why the distinction the academic is drawing is irrelevant. Just doing my part to protect us from all that expertise.

  • Third parties are a kind of chicken-and-egg problem; tiny ones aren’t big enough to get to critical mass, and big ones don’t have the infrastructure developed to survive and grow past the cult of personality that calls them into being. Even if they grow to the point where they actually can affect some close elections, their only real option is to act as spoilers, hurting the major party candidate most similar to them and electing the one less similar. (i.e., thanks Ralph for giving us George.) Since third parties have historically not been able to become viable, acting as a spoiler is just counterproductive.

  • Broder’s observation; “On the contrary, while Washington is gridlocked in partisan battle between two equally spent parties…” is questionable. The Republicans are drifting in rudderless opposition while they wait for the next dispenser of simplistic catch phrases. The Democrats are too timid to capitalize on the electorate’s yearning for real, substantive change. Neither party will clearly enunciate their actual core principles or their true philosophy of governance out of fear that some potential swing voter somewhere won’t like what they say.

    Bloomberg/Hagel won’t solve the problem.

  • change the key, alter the lyrics a little, and voila. A new single.

    I don’t think this analogy holds. Broder doesn’t bother to change the key or alter the lyrics. It’s the exact same column over and over.

  • That the two major parties would simultaneously, successfully, shoot themselves in the foot to the electoral benefit of a previously-unknown third party in a national, presidential election is the most implausible, pie-in-the-sky scenario anybody could imagine in American politics. There are just too many smart people working for both parties. The U.S. military might do something that dumb, or a similar institution might do something that dumb, but the bigwig Democratic and Republican apparatchiks and the people behind them would never let the situation get close to being that.

    By the way, in my previous comment, I should have excepted law professors from my anti-academic screed.

    Also, I should have wrote “it seems like half the time” that academics’ ridicule of lay people for being stupid is uncalled for, for the reasons I wrote, because, of course, I haven’t actually quantified it, but I hope all the non-geniuses out there will be smart enough not hold all my language in all my comments to such appallingly strict standards of precisions.

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