Why I Hate the New York Times: The Endorsement That Wasn't

Bad cork. Via Wine For Real People.

As Steve says,The New York Times's weird "endorsement" of two candidates for the price of one, Warren and Klobuchar, isn't really an endorsement at all. In fact it's a kind of protest against the irritating choice they feel they've been given, between Biden and Sanders: "Waiter, I'm afraid this bottle is corked, could you get us another one?"

With which I'm actually kind of sympathetic, because I've been feeling that way myself from the beginning, that these two superannuated white male cartoon representations of their different ideological stances are just not the best candidates we could end up having to choose between, and I hate the thought that I might have to vote for one of them in the primary just to stop the other one from getting the nomination. I too would like it if Warren and Klobuchar were the front runners, or Warren and Harris for that matter, or Castro and Klobuchar, or Castro and O'Rourke, or Booker and Buttigieg, or whatever, but very much the couple the Times chose as the bottle they'd meant to order in the first place.


The Times is endorsing the debate they would liked to have seen in the campaign, between "realist" and "radical" approaches to governance, and what they think are its best representatives. For which I guess they're right about Warren and not wrong about Klobuchar. Maybe it would have been a good debate.

But I don't see the use of posting a criticism of this kind instead of an endorsement, really. It's too late to make the debate happen. The camps are, at the moment, as they are, and "realism" and "radicalism" are more crowded places. If the paper has any influence in Iowa or New Hampshire its recommendations will simply tend to cancel each other out. It doesn't do any of the things an endorsement is for.

The TV show they created to tease the announcement, on the other hand, in high reality-show style, with interview of the contestants followed by worried cross-talk on the part of the interviewers, reminiscent of The Great British Bakeoff or the old Project Runway, is actually very good, and I don't even mean to mock it that much, informative, asking rather better questions than get asked in the debates, and occasionally pretty sharp ones. A wonderful moment in the rehash sessions is Brent Staples telling about how he's realized more than once that he would be a better president than Trump, "And I said, ah, shit!" My son walking past the laptop thought I was watching a fiction drama, because the video itself is so good.

Even better are the transcripts of the complete interviews, with fact-checking interpolations in the text.

Which also permits you to fact-check The Times itself: some people got very shirty about one of the things they said about Sanders in the "endorsement" text—

Not like the NYT was ever gonna endorse Sanders, and they could have come up with plenty of reasons not to, but this thing about him not compromising is just factually inaccurate https://t.co/xmFuEMkACX

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 20, 2020

But when you look at it, the Times is right: that's exactly what Sanders did:

He won't need to negotiate: he'll just tell McConnell what the American people, and the people of Kentucky, want, and McConnell will be unable to resist. Later, he goes on to say that he'll go around the country staging rallies, starting with Kentucky, to explain to people what he wants to do for them. He's crazy if he thinks McConnell cares about that even if it works: McConnell's been deadly unpopular in Kentucky for his whole career but keeps getting reelected anyway. And will it work? Maybe better than Woodrow Wilson selling the Versailles Treaty and League of Nations, but more likely about the same.

Elizabeth Warren made a similar point, by the way, founded on the not unrealistics belief that most Americans support a progressive agenda without knowing it, but she made it in a different way: not by predicting a "political revolution" to arise spontaneously and knock McConnell off his pedestal (perhaps the same one that didn't get him nominated in 2016), but by describing the painstaking task of working it piece by piece, and pulling the people into the democratic making of demands:

I still like that so much.