Give 'em enough rope. The Times Sunday Week in Review section is usually pretty laughable, in large part because it regularly gives political correspondents like Todd Purdum an opportunity to opine—and in the process to reveal the sorry poverty of their intellects. Purdum's piece yesterday on the Dean flameout ("So What Was That All About?") actually manages to be even more vacuous than the headline suggests.

You know it's going to be a bad day when a by-the-numbers writer like Purdum (try this on for literary size: "Dr. Dean streaked across the political landscape like a comet") looks to position himself as a critic of the conventional wisdom:

In the beginning and at the end, the supposedly smart money in American politics missed much about Dr. Dean, from his stunning early potential to the accumulating missteps that started to spell his doom just as some of the biggest names in politics endorsed him. Odds are good that some early post-mortems predicting his lasting impact may be similarly shortsighted.

Purdum's agenda is to "analyze" Dean's defeat to discover the factors in it that militate against his having a long-term impact. (I'm being a bit generous in stating it quite that coherently.) His thinking, predictably, is fetishistic: Dean's defeat, and what his movement may mean in the longer run, have to do entirely with what Dean and his campaign can be made to represent—the real politics of organizations and of people in their masses are opaque to Purdum's view. (Even more the real politics of the media making and unmaking candidates and their movements.) So Dean failed, and his movement may falter, because in some way or other his message failed: Dean "lacked a broad public policy agenda that was sharply different from most of his rivals," says Purdum, blithely skating past self-contradiction (doesn't that mean his rivals lacked an agenda sharply different from his? and yet it doesn't seem to have hurt them); Dean's "message was strong and sharp, but more strategic than substantive"—meaning, as far as I can tell, nothing more than that Howard (once again) shouldn't have been so darned angry. (See how the voodoo thinking works? The campaign is the same thing as its message, and if the message is weak, so is the campaign.)

Dean, says Purdum, was an outsider candidate, which it's OK to be, more or less, if you're on the side of history, except that Howard isn't:

The Democrats' shattering divisions in 1968 led to reforms in both major parties that emphasized grass-roots power over party insiders and paved the way for Mr. McGovern's nomination in 1972. In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both surged to prominence as outsiders, and four years later, Mr. Reagan and his conservative backers took over the Republican Party with effects that remain obvious today.

But those three candidates were riding historical forces - opposition to a years-old, stalemated war; the corruption of Watergate, and the sense that liberals had forsaken middle-class America - that, at least in hindsight, seem more powerful than the anti-Bush backlash that propelled Dr. Dean.

Exhibit One, this, in why reporters shouldn't be allowed to write about history. There's really more stupidity in this than I can reasonably hope to unpack in a small space. Purdum's "historical forces" are nothing but newsreel highlights at best, and his series isn't even gramatically, much less historically, parallel. (How is "opposition" equal to "corruption"? How is a "sense" a historical agent?) More important: has Todd got his hands on that back-to-the-future DeLorean? Because otherwise I have a hard time understanding from what position of "hindsight" he can judge that the "anti-Bush backlash" (and of course it can't be anything more than a backlash, can it?) has spent itself while we're still in the middle of the fucking election.

But as you might expect, Purdum really shines when he talks about the Internet. Dean lost, apparently, because he didn't blog enough:

Dr. Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, raised $41 million last year, much of it in small contributions through the young medium of the Internet. But they spent almost all of it on old media: direct mail and television, the medium that John F. Kennedy used to transform politics 44 years ago.

"He's going to be a milestone in the history of the Internet, but there's just no way of knowing how much farther we have to go," said Michael Cornfield, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "We can look at what he didn't do: he never got on his own blog. We have yet to see the J.F.K. of the Internet. It's going to be someone like Bob Graham, a compulsive diarist, who's going to be able to command a blog with a distinctive voice, either through a Cyrano staffer or himself."

(Give Purdum credit for not trying to hog all the laugh lines to himself;Michael Cornfield, that's one funny dude. Tomorrow belongs to the diarists!) I'm not sure what we're supposed to get from this: It would have been all OK for Dean if Trippi had spent that young Internet money on something other than old media (like buying a stake in Friendster)? I may not be a big-time political correspondent like Todd Purdum, but it seems to me that the chief reason Presidential candidates try to raise lots of cash is precisely to be able to sell themselves via broadcast, and that having lots of money from whatever source is very much the advantage everybody thinks it is. (An advantage is still an advantage even if you squander it, as Dean appears to have.) But practicalities like this are lost on Purdum, who sees a convenient antonym (young-old) and just can't resist it, coherence be damned. Besides, he's not really expected to produce thought, is he? If you can generate the appearance of it by moving your counters around the board, that's good enough for the Week in Review.

Update: If you want to see actual reporting about what went wrong in Dean's campaign, you won't do much better (at least for the time being) than this piece in USA Today (thanks to Value Judgment for the link). But the Times has always been much more interested in the Dean phenomenon as psychodrama—and in the psychodrama it can project on Dean—than in offering its readers, you know, genuine information about the practical politics of the campaign. Among other things, the USA Today report confirms my sense that Dean's failure as a candidate has approximately nothing to do with the role of the Internet in floating him in the first place.

posted by michael  6:34:57 PM  
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New poem posted in the Poetry Corner this morning, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing.


posted by michael  10:39:21 AM  
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