… Barack Obama, in a totally surprising and counter-intuitive move. Wow.
It’s not much of a surprise, really, but the endorsement editorial should be read, particularly by media-watchers. It is the most banal, idea-free, nonsense-ridden, hack-job of an endorsement one could imagine. (And, this being the New York Times, it is illuminated by the news elsewhere in the paper that rock star Bono will be joining the Times’ op-ed page as a columnist — no, I’m not making that up — and a notice for “The Gay Bed & Breakfast of Terror.”) The endorsement is an embarrassment not because they endorsed the wrong guy: There’s a reasonable and reasoned case to be made for Senator Obama, to be sure. Conservatives won’t agree with the conclusion, but the Idaho Statesman’s endorsement, for instance, is a pretty good one. But the mighty New York Times’ endorsement reads like it came from the student newspaper at a really good junior college.
A few highlights from the Times:
Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism.
This is obviously and flatly untrue. Whatever McCain is, he is neither an extremist nor a racist. This is just pump-priming — get the rubes thinking the guy is a racist whack-job and they’ll believe everything else that follows. But if there are “hints of racism,” mightn’t they come from the guy who belonged to a church with an explicitly race-based theology, the guy who dismissed his grandmother as a “typical white person”?
Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign ….
As compared to what? Kennedy-Nixon? Johnson-Goldwater? Bush-Gore? This has not been a particularly nasty campaign by any informed standard.
Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts.
Can an ideology end up in shards in a bank account? Does this sentence have any actual meaning? And, to the best of my knowledge, it’s Americans’ brokerage accounts that have taken a hit, not their bank accounts.
In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”
So we cannot invest in new schools and roads and science and technology for ourselves? Where do new medicines and medical technologies come from? Computers? Software? Is there a U.S. Department of iPods out there somewhere? Is Harvard a figment of our collective imagination? The conclusion that these are things that we self-evidently “cannot do for ourselves” is non-obvious to say the least.
The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies.
Anti-tax policies? Does somebody have a theory that the credit-market problems were caused by tax cuts? The specialists who actually study this stuff full-time are still gathering data in the hopes of sorting out this story over the course of months or years (or decades), but the New York Times has found the culprit in tax cuts? This is pretty shoddy reasoning, if it can be called reasoning at all. The Times dislikes tax cuts, and we all dislike the recent market turmoil, ergo the financial system’s troubles are evidence that it is “the victim” of “anti-tax policies.” If there’s any evidence that the Bush-era tax cuts are a factor behind the financial panic, the Times has not yet deemed that news fit to print.
You could go on and on through the piece and make similar observations (and I am tempted to do a line-by-line close reading), but the overall impression is one of shoddiness, like they jobbed this one out to an intern.
Maybe they’ll let Bono write the next one. Or Bozo.