For my first post here on DE (where I hope to focus on ideas, inno­va­tions, and inven­tions), I thought it might be fit­ting to link over to a piece I wrote for Slate’s The Big Money that was pub­lished ear­lier today:

Good Rid­dance, Wall Street

Let’s tap America’s talent for some­thing besides greed.

The cur­rent finan­cial bust may have a silver lining, but not the one you might think. The glim­mer of hope isn’t in bar­gain base­ment stocks or dis­tressed real estate. The coming bull market will be one of people and ideas. And the poten­tial gains could out­shine even the most opti­mistic sce­nar­ios for the Dow.

…

For the full arti­cle, click here

…is the gor­geous phrase cooked up by John Dick­er­son in his story today at Slate for the Palin vice-​presidential pick. It’s a good arti­cle, and in it Dick­er­son neatly cap­tures what seems to be the quick-​setting con­ven­tional wisdom about Palin, at least among non-​hardcore Republicans:

Each new fact we learn about Sarah Palin—her rever­sal on the bridge to nowhere, her dis­agree­ments with McCain on issues from wind­fall prof­its to global warm­ing, emerg­ing facts about troopergate—contribute to the feel­ing that this whole Palin thing is being made up as we go along. It may be fun to read about, and it sure is fun to cover, but it also sup­ports the judg­ment of the Palin pick that I first heard from a Repub­li­can vet­eran shortly after the announce­ment: “Reckless.”

…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion was going to end. And sure enough, the whim­per­ing has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t con­vince you, con­sider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s arti­cle in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cor­ner­stone of the new con­ven­tional wisdom about the race.

I’ve been read­ing a lot of polit­i­cal cov­er­age this pri­mary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that read­ing I’ve devel­oped a number of pet peeves about polit­i­cal report­ing. Many of these, I real­ize, are common and long-​standing com­plaints: from the echo-​chamber aspect of it all to the too-​predictable cycle that car­ries “news” from a cam­paign con­fer­ence call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to arti­cles in the news­pa­pers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major com­plaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the cam­paigns and the news media appear to share an assump­tion that seems to me mostly unwar­ranted.