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Trying to harness my fury behind an agenda that feels constructive

- November 13, 2011

Matt Bai writes:

During tumultuous historical moments, it’s useful to think about presidential candidates as being either reflectors or channelers. Reflectors — a Pat Buchanan, say, or a Howard Dean — satisfy the electorate’s fury by reflecting it back. Channelers, like Ronald Reagan (or Barack Obama), harness that fury behind an agenda that feels constructive. The good news for Republicans fearing an intraparty meltdown: Reflectors never win. The bad news: There isn’t a channeler in the bunch.

This is so bad, it’s not even wrong, as the saying goes.

As a brief reflection in a long article, the above paragraph could work. I could imagine someone like Ron Rosenbaum pulling it off. But on its own? It makes no sense at all.

Say what you want about Gregg Easterbrook, at least he goes to the trouble of including actual numbers in his punditry (sure, they’re wrong sometimes, but at least he tries).

My question, though, is how did Bai’s horrible paragraph get into the New York Times in the first place. Is there some editor to whom Bai sent the paragraph, someone who actually read it and said, Yeah, that makes sense? Or did they just pay Bai $x for a paragraph and run it without editing, blog-style? I really don’t understand. I mean, sure, I realize that the daily newspaper has zillions of words and they can’t all be perfect, but didn’t someone have to make the decision to run something so empty as this? It’s not like a column where you accept that there will be an occasional dud. It was just right in the magazine section with other articles.