Yeah, I guess I deserved that. You know what? Never mind. Katrina vanden Heuvel's slap at me for knocking Tim Kaine's appearance while not looking like Brad Pitt purposefully misses my point. In politics, looks matter. That's why the cover of Katrina's new book features her in a miniskirt. That's why a study found voters could look at pictures of two Senate candidates they'd never seen before and predict the winner with 72 percent accuracy. Kaine will be giving the State of the Union response on behalf of the entire Democratic Party. He will be doing it on television, a medium acknowledged as visual ever since John F. Kennedy won a beauty pageant against Richard Nixon. In this context, just about nothing could be more relevant than his looks.
On a slightly different note, Katrina writes:
For liberal bloggers who want to get exercised about something really important: Where are the Democrats or liberals talking about Ford laying off some 30,000 workers, the end of middle class benefits for working Americans, IBM's gutting of pension security, and the collapse of American manufacturing?
In order, how about here, here, here, and here? There's lots to be said against me, but insufficient attentiveness to the collapse of the corporate welfare state just doesn't stick. Also, one post on something doesn't mean I'm exercised about it. I think this this is a perceptual gap between folks who began in print and those who started on blogs, but I write, between my three sites, about ten different posts a day. That five or six of them orbit health care is fairly good evidence that the subject upsets me; one post on one day focusing on Kaine really doesn't rise to the level of obsession.
