Atrios's comments on the ISG touch on a rather important flaw in political punditry:
How is that little old me, one of the blogosphere's most disreputable rabid lambs, understands what's going a hell of a lot better than The Wise Old Men of Washington? Really, I'm just aghast at this. Bush has made it quite clear for months and years that leaving is losing. My brilliant insight isn't based on my ability to look deep into his soul, it is based on my ability to hear what he has said over and over again.
Political punditry has a cold. Or, to put it another way, it's totally infected by Gay Talese's classic profile, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," which took an opaque and taciturn public figure and drew out, through close reporting and observation, the human laying within. That, combined with creeping Dowdism, has destroyed political analysis in this country.
The problem is that the press corps approaches political rhetoric with such reflexive cynicism that it's basically all tossed out as bullshit. In its place, they've substituted characterological analysis, the conclusions of which are generally divined from two days spent hanging with the candidate and a cursory glance at other reports from similar profiles. By peering deep into the politician's soul, writers supposedly assemble carefully observed facial tics and freudian slips into an accurate portrait of the subject, thus illuminating Who He Is and, through that, what he'll do.
It's crap, of course. Indeed, the nice thing about working at an understaffed magazine with limited lede times, no travel budget, and spotty access is that it's forced me to approach political profiling in a different way. When I did the Gore piece, I was stunned by how much lay right there in the public domain, in his speeches and travels and deeds, but had never been seen because no one bothered to look. I'm finding the same with John Edwards. And I tried to take a similar approach in my profiles of Spitzer, Strickland, and Patrick for this month's cover. Even if these candidates lie, or spin -- the leader they want you to think they'll be says something important about the type of administration they hope to run. Similarly, while Time was looking at George W. Bush's midlife abandonment of alcohol for evidence that he'd follow the ISG's recommendations, Atrios just kept listening to what he said. And it turns out that the leader Bush kept trying to portray himself as was the template to look at.
