PrintOctober 28, 2010
Too Expert to Fail
When the midterm Hurricane strikes, large numbers of experts will be proven wrong; politicians to be hardest hit.
If, after November 2, Harry Reid, Alan Grayson, maybe even Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank, find themselves pursuing other lines of work, they will be experiencing the consequence of their constituents having decided that they were more wrong than right in the decisions they made and positions they articulated while in office. Because of their performance on health care reform, stimulating the economy, taxes, energy policy, regulation of the financial industry, etc., a lot of politicians are going to lose their jobs as Congressmen, Senators and powerful committee chairmen
It doesn't quite seem fair, then, that on election night and thereafter, the "experts" who explain the meaning of it all to us will include the likes of Jonathan Alter, Cynthia Tucker, Chuck Todd, Sam Tanenhaus, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Katy Couric, Eugene Robinson, David Brooks, Kirsten Powers, David Corn, Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Joe Scarborough, Tom Brokaw, Ruth Marcus, David Frum, Jeffrey Toobin, Chris Cilizza, Nora O'Donnell, Paul Krugman, Lannie Davis, Bob Shrum, Bill Maher, Nina Totenberg, and the many, many more who will by then have been proven as consistently wrong about the matters upon which they will be pontificating as Barney Frank has been.
If poor Blanche Lincoln and John Dingell are going to have to undergo the defeated politician's equivalent of the perp walk, it just doesn't seem right that Joe Klein and Howard Fineman should be the ones holding forth on election night on why these defeats were inevitable, given the intellectual and psychological limitations of the voters, and how the electoral results really mean nothing in any case.
There ought to be some consequence for the kind of catastrophic journalistic/punditry failure we have experienced since the Legacy Media got behind Obama, but what? Boycotts just don't sit well with most conservatives. Retaliatory firings are definitely out; anyone who has experienced the canonization of Juan Williams will have by now had more than their fill of the crocodile tears and other carryings-on that followed his defenestration by NPR. Speaking of NPR, perhaps retraining in the journalistic craft by participation in their new Soros-funded program to "bring greater transparency and accountability to the workings of state capitals across the country," would be helpful. Charles Blow's and Christiane Amanpour's perspectives would no doubt benefit from a few years spent in Boise or Topeka, but it is hard to imagine that even Soros could cover the necessary salaries and benefits line.
Of course, nothing is going to happen -- yet. The Legacy Media will continue to purvey the supercilious and the tendentious until their progressive alienation from the audience and resultant loss of utility to their advertisers forces insolvency. That moment will be hastened when the results of November 2 provide yet another measure of how wide the gap between reality and propaganda has grown. In the meantime, just ignore them.
