David Brooks has a column of remarkable, simpering stupidity in the Times today. He's up in arms because mythical beasts called "voters" have decided that primaries are about picking a candidate who can, you know, win something. Here's Brooks's incisive analysis of events since the Iowa caucuses:
Suddenly Kerry, who had not changed his views particularly, nor his campaign style, began to see his poll numbers rise in Iowa because Dean seemed a little less electable. Then other Iowa voters began to notice the momentum behind Kerry, which made him look still more electable, so more voters decided that maybe Kerry was the man to support after all.And, what do you know, Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, and from that moment on the election turned into a postmodernist literary critic's idea of heaven. It became an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis of who could win votes later on.
It's the tautology, stupid.
See that? It's the voters' fault! The voters turned this into a postmodern hall of mirrors, with everything pointing at that one slippery central narrative of "electability". The media are just following what the voters have decided -- it's the American way. Riiiight.
This column is typical of Brooks, and typical of political coverage in general -- the media has to pretend it's not a participant, that it's not directing the discourse at every turn, so any change in the narrative must surely come from the voters. Brooks pretends to be mystified as to where the electorate got the idea that the central issue is selecting a candidate who can beat Bush. But he himself was playing the electability game as far back as September, in this NYT column (you can view a copy of the whole article for free here), where he writes:
The results of the highly prestigious Poll of the Pollsters are in! I called eight of the best G.O.P. pollsters and strategists and asked them, on a not-for-attribution basis, if they thought Howard Dean would be easier to beat than the other major Democratic presidential candidates. Here, and I'm paraphrasing, are the results:"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"
You would have thought I had asked them if Danny DeVito would be easier to beat in a one-on-one basketball game than Shaquille O'Neal. They all thought Dean would be easier to beat, notwithstanding his impressive rise.
So Brooks has been playing this postmodern shell game for months, even years. In a column where he brings up Kerry's hair and the bags under his eyes, and discusses not a single substantive issue (except to mention the phrase "national security" in the context of electability), he wants you to believe that the voters have made this a horserace contest. And, to put more postmodern dressing on the salad, there's not one irrelevant reference to popular culture, but two!
The September column has a telling sentence that sums up Brooks's disingenuous line of thinking perfectly:
I think the pollsters are probably right, but I'd feel a lot more confident if I could find somebody who really understood the forces that are reshaping the American electorate.
Um, Mr. Brooks? Try looking in one of the mirrors in that postmodern funhouse sometime. It'll help you understand that "electorate" that confuses you so.
Posted by Chris at January 31, 2004 10:34 AM