I am not a Chuck Todd hater, but I do wish he hadn’t been absorbed into the Beltway punditry Borg. He says he feels physically ill about the Mitch McConnell campaign using his words against Alison Lundergan Grimes, but he’s the one who said that Grimes had disqualified herself by refusing to tell voters who she voted for, which is her right as a U.S. citizen. He has his excuses, but they mainly involve his impatience with politicians not answering questions in a forthright and honest way. Media Matters called him on his double standard in this portion of their interview with Todd.
MEDIA MATTERS: What do you say — what do you think is the standard for saying someone’s disqualified? I mean, things like Mitch McConnell doesn’t believe in —
TODD: My point is, it’s up to a voter.
MEDIA MATTERS: — global warming or others —
TODD: My point is it’s up to the — the voters make that decision, not me.
MEDIA MATTERS: Right, but you’re the one who mentioned it.
The most recent Bluegrass Poll shows the McConnell/Grimes race as a dead heat with McConnell holding a 44%-43% lead, eight percent still undecided, and with a 3.9% margin of error. The results show a slight erosion of Grimes’ position over the last Bluegrass Poll which may or may not reflect some damage from media’s (primarily, Chuck Todd’s) focus on her non-answer to the voting question. But, any way you look at it, no objective political analyst could possibly say with a straight face that Grimes has disqualified herself. She is dead-even in the polls, with close to a 50% chance of winning.
Chuck Todd doesn’t address the fact that he was simply, factually wrong in what he said. Instead, he apologizes for injecting his stupid ill-informed opinion into NBC’s coverage of the most high-profile campaign in the country. He doesn’t acknowledge that, by his own standard, Mitch McConnell should have disqualified himself many times over, but retreats to saying that the voters should decide what is disqualifying.
Maybe we should be discussing what ought to disqualify a political pundit from having one of the most important jobs in political media.