Sometimes, Matt Bai writes some very strange things. "The sharpest attacks in the Democratic campaign thus far — and the ones that have provoked the most emotion in partisan blogs and columns — involve, oddly enough, health-care mandates," he says. "Even when I mentioned the other day on the blog that I was thinking of delving into mandates this week, I got a flood of passionate e-mails from very smart people on the subject, trying to sway me one way or the other. This tells me two things: one, I need to change my e-mail address, and two, the fight about mandates is about something deeper than mandates." Yes. When Matt Bai suggests he's about to enter a policy question, and readers e-mail him with passionate arguments about the policy question, he immediately assumes that they can't seriously be interested in the actual policy question. He then goes on to show that he's not seriously interested in the policy question, and rather than try to puzzle through the evidence on it, simply concludes that "no one really knows for sure which theory is right or whether any of these plans can be legislated, anyway." I will resist the urge to compare this ambiguous conclusion on an empirical question with the concrete conclusions Bai and his colleagues routinely emerge with on actually unknowable political questions. Bai ends with the argument that "For Mr. Obama’s critics on the left, though, something else is going on, and it has more to do with pure partisan rage." Yikes. Accusing Jon Cohn of partisan rage is like accusing Mr. Rogers of being a bad neighbor. You'd need to prove we were in the End Times before anyone would believe you. I mean, seriously. Read this. "Rage" is not a word that comes to mind. But, remarkably, it's easier for Bai to attribute intra-progressive policy battles to partisan rage rather than genuine interest in, and commitment to, the substantive issues at hand. He's literally written an article trying to explain away people's attention to policy as nothing more than dressed-up partisanship. This suggests that our nation's top political reporters find it impossible to believe that anyone could be actually invested in policy disputes. This strikes me as a problem. Or maybe that's just my partisan rage talking.
