Sep 2, 2008
…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.”
Mar 21, 2008
…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. [Read more]
Mar 1, 2008
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. [Read more]
