Legal Commentary

Modern Punditry: Analysis Of Style Not Substance

By Big Tent Democrat

How is President Obama doing? On this page, we try to look at the substance of what he is doing and whether he is taking steps to achieve policies we deem effective. Hence, we applauded his executive orders on Gitmo and torture, stem cell research, the signing of the Lily Ledbetter Act, the S-CHIP bill and similar actions that forwarded policies we think are good policy. We criticized actions we believe forwarded bad policy, most recently the Obama Administration's embrace of the Bush expansive view of the state secrets privilege. We have spent a good deal of time on the stimulus issue. Today in the WaPo, Ruth Marcus provides a prime example of how the Beltway pundits discuss issues - style over substance:

[T]here were problems with the rollout of his stimulus package. The administration ceded too much control over the contents to House Democrats, although it was nowhere near as hands-off as it has been portrayed. It was entirely foreseeable that Republicans would cherry-pick individual elements for ridicule; the administration excised some of them but failed to do enough to anticipate the outsized problems that remaining items would cause. The president, until he rebooted this week with travel and a prime-time news conference, lost control of the message to Republicans, who were only too happy to seize it.

The rollout? The message? But what of the SUBSTANCE of the policy? This is the lens that treats the absurd and irrational actions of the Beltway "bipartisan" BSers in the Senate (Nelson, Collins, Specter, Snowe, McCaskill, etc.) as a good thing. It is unthinking and frankly, counterproductive, punditry. But it is the way of the DC Gasbag.

And it comes from all angles. At the Daily Howler, Bob Somerby has been harping on this issue as well:

In this passage, Herbert engages in a great deal of invective about Corker’s “pointless” obstruction and lack of a brain. But he fails to describe the detailed complaint Corker made in that CNN appearance; instead, he says how offended he is by the rude man’s choice of words (in this case, by the word “disaster”). But: Was there any merit to Corker long, detailed objection? Did his objection make any sense? We don’t have the slightest idea—in part, because we waste our time reading hacks like Herbert. It’s amazingly easy to write columns like this—columns which make little attempt to address the merits of any issue, which simply name-call opponents instead. But here’s our question to you, dear readers: Do you know what Corker actually said? We do, because we saw him on CNN. But Herbert’s readers don’t know what he said, and never will—and they’ll get no help f[rom] Herbert when it come to understanding the merits. If Corker’s presentation was wrong or patently ludicrous, that would be important news—the kind of news that might affect the judgments of voters. But Herbert was too lazy to research and offer such work. Instead, he complained that Corker had said the word “disaster”—and he told you that this conduct made him a very bad man.

This comes from all spectrums. The right will name call the left. The left will name call the right. The "center" will name call the left and the right. It has always been revealing that Paul Krugman was deemed the Shrill One - in that of all the pundits working from Establishment Media, for 8 years he has been the only one who actually discussed the substance of policy. To be shrill is to actually discuss --- and criticize -- based on the actual substance of policy. It is something the Beltway pundits are simply incapable of doing.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 11, 2009 (boomark / email).