Watch any cable news show for any length of time, and you’re bound to see a talking head identified as a party “strategist.” It’s a nice little euphemism, that’s used quite a bit more by television producers than it should be.
Jane Fleming Kleeb went on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks ago to talk about global warming, a topic on which, by her own admission, she’s hardly an expert. So who, then, is Jane Fleming Kleeb? Well, according to the Chyron that flashed across the screen after Bill O’Reilly introduced her, she is a “Democratic strategist.” But she’s hardly that, either.
“The first time they called me a strategist,” Fleming Kleeb recalls, “I literally laughed on TV.”
She kept a straight face this time, however, because she has grown accustomed to the misbegotten label. It all started in 2006, when Fleming Kleeb, the deputy director of Young Voter PAC, was asked to appear on MSNBC and Fox to talk about young voters. She did well enough in those early forays that she was soon brought back on the air to discuss a wider range of political matters.
Thus, Fleming Kleeb was anointed a “Democratic strategist” and made regular appearances on cable news shows as such, before decamping from Washington for Nebraska, where her husband is running for a U.S. Senate seat. She now makes about one appearance per week via satellite feed from the heartland.
“There is a whole group of us like that,” says Fleming Kleeb.
And what a group it is. The title implies that you offer your party strategic advice of some kind, in some formal way. But that’s not it at all — in the context of the cable news shows, “strategist” means “person who can take the party line in front of a camera.”
But that probably wouldn’t look good on the Chyron.
This has been an odd phenomenon for quite a while, but for some reason, the Politico’s Daniel Libit seems to be blowing the lid off a story that insiders aren’t supposed to talk about.
Among the things that the proliferation of TV cable news has wrought is slackened standards for what constitutes a political strategist. Now used as a catchall tag for a whole host of people with varied — and often peripheral — backgrounds in electoral politics, the term has all but lost its meaning.
“I think it’s absurd,” says Ed Rollins, a bona fide strategist who has held high-ranking positions in numerous Republican presidential campaigns. “Everyone calls themselves a strategist. I have been doing this for 40 years, I know most of the players, and I go on these shows and think, ‘Who are these people?'”
“It’s like Noah’s ark. There are a couple of these people, a couple of those people, with no skill and no real analytical ability.”
As Fleming Kleeb tells it, this group of make-believe strategists has become something of a pundits club, with participants working together to compensate for each other’s experiential or informational deficiencies.
“There is a small group of us that rely on one another to help each other with talking points,” she says. “Then I have a small group of friends who make sure it’s on message with the Democratic talking points.”
While I have nothing against these pseudo-strategists, and don’t blame them in the slightest for the title bestowed on them by cable networks, I can’t help but wonder what the point is of having them on.
By that I mean, what is the audience supposed to learn from these appearances? Partisans get talking points, which they recite on the air. They’re identified as “strategists,” which lend their talking points an air of credibility, but they’re not actually strategists at all. In most instances, their connections to their party fall somewhere between tenuous and non-existent.
So, why bother? Probably because cable news producers wake up every morning thinking, “Whoa, that’s a lot of airtime to fill.”
The audience won’t really learn anything, but there will always be someone on TV, saying something.