The worst political punditry is forever consistent: It treats the act of electing those who will govern our nation as a sports competition. There is no significance attached to who wins or loses, or word of what the repercussions of that might be. Candidates are rated not based on whether they tell truth or lies, but whether the audience liked the performance. The narrative is key, where the narrative is the pundit's explanation of how every move and twitch of the race does or does not play into a paragraph or two of armchair psychology scrawled out in the first few weeks of the campaign, or earlier than that if the pundit has had it squirreled away in his back pocket for a while.
This is how we get such brilliance as Erick Erickson's declaration that Trump's rancid unconstitutional gibberish is clever politics, because rancid unconstitutional gibberish may be deplorable but it’s exactly what the writhing base wants to hear. This is why Carly Fiorina can have an apparent psychotic episode onstage, describing videotapes that never were and scenes that never existed, and immediately afterward be declared the winner of a debate because even though everyone with a speck of knowledge about the political scene knew immediately that she was lying, unconditionally and absolutely, the tremor of emotion in her voice was surely Compelling.
And it is how we get things like The Washington Post's B-team declaring that “The Worst Year in Washington” was just experienced by Jeb Bush and, for the required pundit parity—Hillary Clinton?
Bush ends the year in the far more hopeless position. He is mired in single digits in every national and key early-state poll, placing fifth among Republican candidates in the latest Washington Post-ABC News survey. Clinton is way ahead of her closest Democratic rival — Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders — nationally.But the similarities in the un-dynamic duo’s year are striking [...]
I have made a point of not yet giving a damn who I will be voting for, mind you, but the premise that a famous son mired in the 3 percent range of polls and buried under a seeming avalanche of competitors with far quicker wits and more ardent fans is directly comparable to the woe faced by the other side's cash-rich frontrunner smells strongly of Repurposed Narrative Soup. Closer inspection doesn't do the meal any favors.
