That's Rich

By Ankush

We've seen this movie before. It's not like there aren't legitimate and serious criticisms to be made of Hillary Clinton, but I think Frank Rich actually does Clinton's people a service by wrapping his (barely identifiable) substantive criticism of the Senator in his tired, political-analysis-as-theater-criticism shtick.

Look, successful politicians are inauthentic. You don't come close to being President without developing a carefully cultivated public persona. To pretend otherwise is nonsense, and you tend to see people harp on the A-word most often when all they're really trying to do is say that, on a personal level, they just don't like someone. In 2000, Rich's problem was that serial liar and egghead Al Gore, constantly boring us all with his talk of actual policies. Yawn! Today, we get a couple paragraphs on Hillary Clinton's laugh, with which we're apparently supposed to be concerned. ("Then there was that laugh," Rich writes, at which point you immediately feel a headache coming on. And just for the record, a purportedly serious New York Times columnist making unironic use of a Daily Show segment that mocks a presidential candidate's laugh is exactly the sort of thing that the Daily Show would make fun of.)

There's more of this silliness, of course.  Rich mocks "the track record of Washington's conventional wisdom," as if his performance during the 2000 election never happened. There's his claim that Clinton was "tardy" with her health care plan, as though announcing a plan 14 months before a general election and five months before primaries is somehow meaningless. (And what does Rich think about that plan? Hard to say.) He says that the Clinton campaign "works relentlessly to shut down legitimate journalistic vetting of her record," citing their work in killing a story that was to be "an account of infighting in Hillaryland" and thus not clearly at all about Clinton's "record," as well as a story about the delay in releasing a large number of Clinton's papers during her time as First Lady, even though the story in question never once suggests that Clinton has had anything to do with this holdup.

It's easy to forget this since Rich so frequently -- and, on occasion, devastatingly -- writes about Iraq, but the man is not a particularly good columnist. His grasp of substantive domestic policy is tenuous at best, and his interest in the stagecraft of politics, while entertaining enough when it was in the Arts pages, has devolved into a stultifying self-parody of precisely the sort that a more adept and self-aware version of Rich would savage. With Bush becoming increasingly irrelevant, we're going to get more of this from Rich, and it's a safe bet that unless the Democrats nominate someone of whom he approves, you're going to be hearing quite a bit about the supposed inauthenticity of the liberal in the race. 

And if this were to mean that a liberal New York Times columnist might actually help elect a Republican -- again?  Well, a guy's gotta write columns, doesn't he?

Update: Just as a response to some of the comments, it's not that we shouldn't be concerned with stagecraft at all when choosing a nominee.  The problem is that a lot of that sort of analysis is plainly silly, and when we buy into it -- or don't call people in the supposed liberal media out on it -- we end up shooting ourselves in the foot.  I get the distinct feeling that the kind of people who would call "that laugh" of Hillary Clinton's "the Cackle" are pretty much the same kind of people who complained about Al Gore sighing too much. And it's not that Gore is blameless for 2000 -- his temperament probably contributed to the mostly restrained nature of his campaign -- but it's also clear that he didn't get a fair shake.