Some months ago, I heard Bill Kristol on some program. I called in and revoked his pundit's license.  I said that he had said hundreds of things, and every single one was wrong.

He spluttered and mumbled something about standing on his record, but he knew that he had been called.

Funny, he's still punditizing.

you've just got to work for what you believe, because the idea of predictability or electability is often wrong, and it's used as a tool to keep you from working for what you believe.

Preach it brother.

What Morris, and the pundits, are all about, is a delusional sense of self-confidence that shames Americans into non-participation.

What proportion of voters actually read op-eds? What credibility do they give them?

Ditto with the talk shows and the cable shoutfests.

For instance, Pew in June 04 (PDF) found that only 25% of Fox viewers (who naturally skew GOP) believe all or most of what they're told by the network. (There is, mark you a shocking credulity gap between GOP and Dem voters: that 25% number includes 24% of Dems to 29% of GOP. For all the other quoted news sources, Dems believed more than GOP.)

My guess - I don't know whether research has been done on this - is that cable news credibility on relatively straight news stories is a good deal higher than pundit chat.

Plus - to complete the argument, you need to assert the counterfactual that, without all these delusional pundits spewing their garbage, voters would be thrusting forth their opinions in droves who now hide their political lights under bushels.

I don't believe it.

And when you go on to say

You can't trust these people, but it's very hard to mistrust 'experts' when they are telling you that you can't do something.  Our culture reveres 'experts'.   I'm just not sure that there are any experts in politics.

After all, it's part of the tradition of the Democratic Party to distrust elites telling ordinary folks what to do for their own good. On the other hand, that sentiment runs alongside a deep-seated tendency towards conformism, and a history of said ordinary folks being suckered by snake-oil salesmen or fearmongers.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, on occasion, elites may be more responsive to such delusion-inducing talk than their intellectual inferiors. The infatuation with communism during the 1930s in the US and the UK is a case in point.

The audience for the talk shows and the op-eds (especially the NYT op-eds, these days!) is, I'd suggest, disproportionately elites. The coded language, the references are commonplace to elites (or a subset of them), but gobbledegook to Joe Sixpack.

And the shock horror reactions of bloggers to the latest outrage of Matthews or Russert would leave their uninitiated fellow-citizens wondering What happened?

When was the last time he advised a successful campaign? When was the last time he predicted election outcomes better than someone's auto mechanic.

The media call on him & others because they know him and he'll give a "good quote". Sheer laziness, rather than promoting sage observation. We need to keep asking them to do better.

Well done, Matt.

I say again, if we had elections with three runoffs and approval voting for the first two runoffs (not "IRV"), we could simply support the candidates we find acceptable, and not worry about having White Hat upstarts weaken the Gray Hats, and cause the election of Black Hats.

I also think we should be careful not to take the corporate metoyou apparatus seriously. Some of them provide the news, but at the end of the day, they are merely hired trolls. They are not to be taken seriously. Of course, sites like "redstate" are not serious. They are nothing but masterbation circles for neocon skunk-trolls, who have never had one serious idea or thing to say in their entire lives.

And this "morris" neocon sleazebag? Just a high-payed skunk-troll.

How about him actually learning? I dislike Morris too...but don't you think it's possible he actually learned something in the months in between?

Just a thought...not a defense.

fabulous essay.

John Dewey was quoted saying, "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination." it seems that the quote is equally valid when the word science is replaced with politics. unfortunately, because great advances and successes require change, and change decreases the hold of the professional politicos, it is something they must try and suppress until it is apparent they cannot succeed.

i disagree with Skeptic06 about 'ordinary people' and experts. working in the scientific and medical fields, i can attest firsthand to the remarkably unwise things that people do, against their own judgment, because they were so instructed by a less-than-qualified expert. i suspect most tradesmen have observed similar things.

i think the problem is that Skeptic is equating expert and elite, two things that do not necessarily go together. people established as experts often receive less, not more, critical evaluation, i think because we have been raised not to question our elders/betters/experts. this phenomenon has actually led one specialist (Sackett DL) to propose tongue in cheek that specialists be required to change specialties ~every 10 years to improve creativity in the medical fields and keep people questioning one another.

in medicine, we have our students to question us, to push us to improve and to see things from another angle. in politics, we have grassroots campaigns and independents. unfortunately, as Matt points out, Dems as well as the GOP have fallen so deeply under the spell of their own rhetoric and pollsters that they can apparently no longer hear the questions, saddling us instead with ridiculous monstrosities like Lieberman.

ah well, that is why we have Matt, no?

I don't think this is due to learning.  I think it's an extremely conscious decision to always appear 100% confident once your certainty reaches 51%.

Suppose there's an issue, and you think you know what the right answer is, but you just can't be sure. And let's face it, Morris had no idea in March, and he knew he didn't.

As a political (and television) matter, it plays better to simply change your mind more often, speaking every time with complete confidence as if you've always said the same thing.  To most onlookers, this (probably for psychological reasons I'm incompetent to probe) appears better than to carefully consider things, admit that various solutions each have pluses and minuses, and that sometimes you can't know the answer but you have to try what you think is best.

As a policy matter (i.e. in matters of dealing with reality as it truthfully is), your commitment to a policy should generally track your ability to be certain it is correct.

I think both pundits and Republicans have mastered the political tactic.  You can be sure that if the Iraqi government asks Bush to withdraw, he'll act as if he had always been for withdrawal.  And he'll get less flack for "being weak" than if he had said all along he was staying but might change his mind based on conditions.

I admire your refocus on class differences as a basis of political faction, but it is a bit twisty and difficult to understand. If you only threw out that bit to reinforce your beef with Morris and his tribe I apologize.

The now defunct media watchdog magazine "Brill's Content" had a regular feature in which they'd examine every prediction made by all the big Beltway pundits and then compare those predictions against reality. They'd only award points (plus or minus) for clear results -- vague, hand waving "predictions" didn't count. There was no weighting, so trivial predictions counted just as much as earth changing ones. There were some general findings:

1. "Chimpy" (the magazine's in-house pundit, a chimpanzee) not so surprisingly was about 50% correct. That made him a pretty good pundit -- somewhere in the top quartile.

2. Conservative pundits fared worse -- often much worse -- than their "liberal" counterparts. Margaret Carlson and Eleanor Clift did pretty well, for example. George Will and Fred Barnes, not so good. (In fact, I think "The Beltway Boys" with Barnes and Mort Kondracke was one of the poorest performing programs at the time.)

3. Some pundits made far more predictions than others -- there was quite a bit of variability in their prognosticating tendencies. How much punditing they did didn't seem to be correlated to, say, salaries and appearance fees.

I say, bring back Chimpy!

Matt is right about the punditocracy's priority:  reinforcing its status as an elite class with condescension and pretention. Don't underestimate the "we're sitting up here with a view you don't have" expert pose.

To them, being right or wrong, contradicting themselves, etc. doesn't matter, anymore than it matters to a palm reader or carnival psychic. It's the illusion they must maintain, at all costs.

Nice post.  The punditry / party operatives / campaign consultants are so inside the beltway and into getting their slice of someone else's pocketbook, they forget that others are watching them now.

Of course, why anyone would give any credence at all to anything that Dick Morris would say is totally beyond me.

It's not so much that they never admit a mistake as that they are clueless as to any science of social / human / political behavior. They treat this like a chemical reaction involving nearly inert materials rather than the tumultuous activity of dynamic human beings.

A lot of people out here have sensed Joementum was vulnerable for some time and that attacking him presented a great opportunity. The issues are there, spectacularly the war, but many, many others that have been coming out as the campaign progresses. One subterranean matter not widely appreciated is how teachers across this nation have been seething about school vouchers for decades, we read about it virtually monthly in our union publications. It has been just immensely galling to watch that poseur Lieberman become the great voucher champion. That fact alone helps account for both CT teachers' unions endorsing Lamont and I bet they've been ready for this for a long time.

I remember people wringing their hands about taking on Joe not so long ago -- oh my God, we will be risking the credibility of the blogosphere. My attitude: fuck the blogosphere if it can't or won't execute a campaign like this, it's not worth anyone's time. Watching the blogs getting behind Lamont has been deeply gratifying, participating in the discussion and seeing the consensus develop to go for it.

Really a perfect storm is developing: a vulnerable and marvelously inept target candidate of high national status, a self-financing opponent, an emerging movement for power throwing in with the challenger. That's how you win battles and accumulate power -- by engaging in social struggle, prudently and intelligently, but also boldly. That is something Dick Morris will never understand.
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