Game changing inside baseball for dummies
by digby
I wrote about some tiresome Villagers for Salon today:
[N]onsensical attention to trivia is what drives campaign coverage, and one clue as to why that is can be found in this article in last weekend’s Washington Post style section:
With the presidential campaign just getting started, the race for the White House figures to be the most covered, and perhaps the most over-covered, story of 2015. Major news organizations have all but made that official by engaging in an arms race of sorts to hire more political journalists. The staffing binge comes as many in the news media are cutting back in other areas.
Perhaps the most ostentatious hire of the cycle is Bloomberg Media nabbing the king of conventional wisdom Mark Halperin and his sometime writing partner John Heilemann for a reported cool million each several months ago. They have been campaign reporting darlings ever since they published their 2008 book “Game Change” known for the HBO movie featuring Julianne Moore and the vicious, back-biting gossip obsessively directed at Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the wives of other candidates, from Cindy McCain to Elizabeth Edwards. (The latter portrayal will go down in history as one of the most gratuitously cruel portraits of a dying woman ever put on the page.)
[…]
If you’re curious about the “not dumbed down” coverage so far, here’s a little taste of their “definitive scouting report” on Hillary Clinton:What she’s got: A gold-plated resume; policy expertise (foreign and domestic); a deep and wide fundraising base; staunch support among every key Democratic nominating constituency; no viable intra-party challenger (as of now); a strong, battle-tested staff; skin as thick as a rhino’s hide (about most things); unrivaled understanding of the hyper-partisan media freak show; historic nature of her candidacy; nostalgia for the Roaring Nineties; her husband.
What she lacks: A clear rationale for her candidacy; a compelling or even discernible message; evident skills at managing a winning campaign operation; natural gifts as a political performer; the consistent ability to free herself from the constant miasma of chaos and psycho/melodrama that have swirled around her for decades; the ready capacity to represent the future rather than the past.
So, she’s got a top résumé, enough money, no challenger, a competent staff and a good husband going for her. On the other hand, she’s an incompetent, talentless, aging, shrieking harpy with no reason to run. Oh, and she hasn’t mastered the magical ability to make Heilemann and Halperin disappear in a puff of smoke. How foolishly inept of her.
Read on … it’s going to be a long campaign.