Tag: kilgore

Ed Kilgore has some thoughts on Democratic leadership and the need for term-limits (and specifically for Nancy Pelosi):

Ever since Democrats fell short of their 2016 goal of taking back control of the U.S. House, there’s been talk about […] leadership change in the House Democratic Caucus. And after Democrats failed to win any of the four GOP House seats where special elections were held this year, there was renewed talk about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House Democratic Leader. The negative buzz became particularly loud after the party’s biggest special-election hope, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, suffered a disappointing loss, in the wake of Republicans running many millions of dollars of ads linking the candidate to Pelosi.

[…]

[Pelosi] is a much bigger target for Republicans than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell appears to be for Democrats. Part of the problem may simply be that she happens to represent a jurisdiction with rich negative symbolism (dating back at least to the attacks on “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 after the Donkey Party held its convention in the City by the Bay) for the conservatives who are mostly the target for anti-Pelosi ads. You cannot quite imagine Democrats running ads mocking Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky in this manner.

Emphasis added by me because Kilgore completely discounts the most important information in his several paragraphs. The demonization of Pelosi has nothing to do with her having been in the arena for too long, being a woman, coming from San Francisco, or anything else. Those are all useful pegs for the GOP to build their messaging on and around, but they aren’t themselves decisive or even all that interesting. Anyone serving as minority leader will immediately come under sustained and focused attack from the right wing and their stenographers in much of the media. It’s Cokie’s Law: if information, factual or otherwise, is “out there” then it must be discussed uncritically. Thus the media happily carries the GOP messaging machine’s water on Pelosi and anybody else in the cross-hairs that day. There’s just no getting around it, and The Democrat not only doesn’t have anything like this, they aren’t even on the same planet with the scale and coordination of this operation. Unless and until they create a sustained messaging attack on McConnell and Ryan, those two can continue right on doing what they’re doing. Just to focus on McConnell, he’s likely the most destructive force in government today, but most people would be hard pressed to name him, much less know what he’s been up to and why it is dismantling the way our government has, until recently, functioned.
That’s simply not the case for Pelosi, and that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s from San Francisco and everything to do with a sustained, targeted, and years long messaging attack that salts the Earth and leaves useful framing tools for any GOP hopeful to pick up and use, readymade. Democrats try to build the machine from scratch with every individual election, every cycle. How’s that working out for them?

Lastly, if you like the ACA, thank Nancy Pelosi. Period. That doesn’t mean she gets a pass to serve in party leadership forever, but she did that lift more or less with her own political momentum and within the context of the sustained, entirely negative noise machine and well after perceptions about her in the media were set in stone. Think on that as you try to show her the door.

[Nate Silver’s] entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”

Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of the New York Times and quoted on Political Animal by Ed Kilgore, helpfully points out just how fetid a swamp modern “journalism” has become. If you’re not a stenographer, specializing in “horse race […] or ‘punditry’” you need not apply and your brand of, uh, being right and pointing out just how wrong our gang of Wise Serious People are is entirely inconvenient and works against our business model, such as it is. Sad.

It’s not so easy to see Perry’s path to the GOP nomination in 2016. He may have to deal with an intrastate rival, Ted Cruz, who excites conservatives at home and everywhere else immensely more than the Perry. Cruz and Chris Christie can outdo Perry at macho bluster; Rand Paul has a far more devoted following; there’s no obvious “Establishment front-runner” to which Perry could pose as an alternative; and virtually everyone on the Mentioned list of 2016 candidates looks a lot smarter than the Texas governor (i.e., there’s no parade of clown-car candidates like Bachmann, Cain and Gingrich to lend Perry some comparative gravitas).

Ed Kilgore on Governor Rick “Good Hair” Perry’s relative chances. Agree completely. Should he run, I think 2016 will make Perry long for his superlative performance of 2012.

Also, points for credibly working “Perry” and “some comparative gravitas” into a single phrase. Kilgore showing us how it’s done, yet again.

Get Thee Behind Me

What’s the superlative form of yep? Ed Kilgore earns it here:

By […] simply mocking Santorum as someone too unsophisticated to understand the supernatural as a fairy tale for rubes, his MSM tormenters are not only letting him off the hook for his sinister interpretation of politics as holy war, but are doing him the signal service of reinforcing his manichean vision of America torn between humble believers and derisive, self-satisfied elites.

I couldn’t put it any more clearly than that. So I excerpted it; you really should read the whole thing.
Anywho: the issue here is not that Santorum believes in Satan or the Tooth Fairy, it’s that the broader outcome of those views is such that he declares all of Protestantism as a “phony theology.” That’s where and what to attack and attack legitimately, MSM, not his belief in all or part of the Roman Catholic catechism.

Get Thee Behind Me