This is hysterical. From Greenwald, citing Radar Online:
Beaming after the Columbia event, [Presidential candidate Mike] Gravel walks with [Newsweek’s Jonathan] Alter to a nearby Cuban restaurant for a late lunch. On the way they encounter a gray-haired gentleman in owlish glasses. Alter greets him very respectfully. “This is Tom Edsall,” he says. Edsall was a senior political writer for the Washington Post for 25 years. He retired from the paper in 2006 and now writes for the New Republic and teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Gravel smiles broadly and says, “Hey, can you straighten out David Broder?” Broder, an influential columnist at the Post and the unofficial godfather of the D.C. press corps, has been a target of much criticism from liberal blogs for seeming to provide political cover for Bush on Iraq, even with a majority of Americans now opposing the war. “He doesn’t believe in the power of the people!” Gravel says.
Edsall blinks and looks perplexed. “David Broder is the voice of the people,” he replies matter-of-factly. Gravel starts to smile, assuming Edsall is making an absurdist joke. But Edsall is not joking. The two men look at each other in awkward silence over a great gulf of unshared beliefs, then Gravel chuckles and walks ahead into the restaurant.
I don’t really have anything to add. David Broder as a ‘man of the people’ is so preposterous that it pretty much says it all about the mindset of Beltway pundits.
rolls right off the tongue doesn’t it?
the man referred to as “relentlessly centrist” by hertzberg at the The New Yorker?
pseudo patrician, beltway blowfish?…that’s truly inane!
these guys are going to take it very badly when the bubble bursts.
lTMF’sA
I can’t help but wonder if there is anyone left who actually takes Broder seriously.
NO! That doesn’t even begin to say enough, much less “all”.
Anyone interested in how “not enough” that is, should read Digby’s monday piece:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/vain-in-our-highmindedness-by-digby-its.html
It is time for two parties, and a non-compromised media to fairly referee (haaaaaaaahahahahaha).
But, it could happen.
I have a dream………
IMHO, “the news” has become another casualty of money and celebrity. I would like to have Cy Young and Ed Murrow get together and discuss this.
someone who writes for The National Review.
Not that Gravel is going to read this, or anybody else for that matter, but he should have asked, “What makes you think that?”
Not because Edsall’s answer would have led to the discovery of some common ground underlying their great gulf of unshared beliefs, but just because the question would have embarrassed Edsall and forced him to say something even more ridiculous in the attempt to justify his belief. The saying of which would have embarrassed him still further.
Professional intellectuals, esteemed journalists, and the like, have one thing in common with the rest of us: they tend to parrot whatever is said in their (chosen or not chosen) communities, the repeating of which has won them — in those communities — signs of approval.
However, they tend to differ from the rest of us in two respects.
First: they have (by and large) a higher expectation of being believed, or at least deferred to, in virtue of their authority.
Second: they are (by and large) more invested in an image of themselves as independent thinkers; consequently, more sensitive to anything that suggests that they might be mindlessly repeating some mere parochialism; and as a third consequence, more shaken by a question that raises, in their still-insecure minds, the possibility that what they have just uttered is some mindless claptrap for which they can conjure no justification, only a visibly desperate appearance of one.
So, Mr. Gravel (or anybody else), the next time such a person says such a thing to you, simply ask, “Why do you think so?”
This is the kind of thing that makes these people nervous.
It’s not much, I know. But some people need to be made nervous.
And it can be done so easily.