As I sipped my morning coffee in front of MSNBC, anchor Chris Jansing cited some Politico article to frame a question to her panel of third-tier pundit wannabes. “Is Obama politically isolated?” she asked seriously (I’m paraphrasing).
Um, huh? I thought to myself, feeling my eyes going vacant and my jaw slackening.
A little later, I’m jacked into the Digitalsphere to for my daily intravenous news fix. After ingesting the important stuff, I come across the Politico story Jansing cited on air. “PRESIDENT OBAMA IS ISOLATED AHEAD OF 2012,” the "click-on-me!" headline screamed. Now what? I mumble, clicking in to read it, lemming-like. Unsurprisingly, it’s a shallow take on what ails Obama in the wake of the midterms. Long story short: “He’s isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics.” He’s apparently doomed because of a “siege mentality” at the White House – or something.
Bottom line: The story is a classic Politico maneuver to drive the news cycle. It’s working of course; and explains why MSNBC’s Jansing, like a trained seal, took the bait and jumped happily through the obligatory hoop to Politico’s applause. And that slapping of fins you hear is Hardball’s Chris Matthews – one of the worst accommodators – waiting in turn for his fish. His performance starts at 5 p.m. (Bet on it.)
Anyway, I post a quick note on Twitter saying this is off-the-mark “news cycle” drivel, add a link to the story, and move on. Thinking about Politico’s patented antics too long is, well, that way lies madness.
Enter Josh Marshall, founder of the influential Talking Points Memo blog. Citing the aforementioned Politico piece, he said it is “a distillation of what we desire not to be.” Marshall accurately describes Washington as “a company town. Insular, incestuous, small.” Among its misshapen spawns is Politico. Ergo, in covering DC, he says TPM ‘s motto is “Be in it but not of it.” Well said, I note on Twitter. Glad somebody is taking Politico to task on its unhelpfulness in our political discourse.
Then, unexpectedly, the influential Andrew Sullivan weighs in. “Look: there is a critique of Obama's presidency thus far, in terms of losing a core narrative,” he writes. “But this blizzard of petty Village resentments a real story? Josh is right. Blech.”
Blech, indeed. Two gusts of fresh air during a single morning. But, alas, my euphoria proves fleeting. For I find myself reading a sobering op-ed by LA Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez about why so many Americans opt out of voting. Rodriguez voted in the midterms, but like a lot of folks, has grown weary of viewing the country “though the prism of its politics.”
Rodriguez writes:
For too long, we've couched political disengagement in negative moral terms. The shirkers, the reluctant, are portrayed as the ones who don't "care enough": They didn't get off their butts; they wouldn't step away from their own parochial concerns to take on the fate of the whole.If a self-described political junkie like Rodriguez feels this way, one can only imagine the state of mind of the average voter. In his piece, Rodriguez summed it up in one word: Disgust.
But maybe they care too much. Politics for the sake of politics is soul crushing. No matter how you ingest it — old media, new media, even on Comedy Central — it's constricting and constraining, as if you're being forced to comprehend America solely through Internet comment boards or "Keeping Up With the Kardashians."
Disengagement is not a permanent solution. How long can a democracy survive if we turn away? But like a baseball fan betrayed by the steroid scandal, it's going to be awhile before I can reengage with what was once my favorite sport.
This is precisely the kind of collateral damage Politico, its imitators and its facilitators produce in the body politic. I do not lay all or even most of the blame at their feet. American politics is, well, complicated. Team Politico has a right to do what it does; and I’d die fighting for their right to do it.
But having that right does not mean it is.
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