Why the New York Times should fire Bill Kristol from the op-ed page

This all began on a Weekly Standard-sponsored cruise to Alaska in 2007.  The New Yorker tells all:

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ‘s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

Take note, please, that each of those three individuals — Kristol, Barnes, and Gerson — is a charter member of the media elite.  Between the three of them, they cover the Weekly Standard, the NY Times, Fox News, and the Washington Post.  It doesn’t get any more “establishment media” than that.  OK, so what happened at the lunch?

The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to [Alaska Federation of Republican Women head Paulette] Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by-a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.”

Aw, Billy fell in love.  How sweet.

Anyway, according to a “longtime friend” of McCain quoted by the New Yorker, when it came time for McCain to choose a running mate, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms” for Palin.  That is confirmed by Kristol’s NY Times columns in advance of McCain’s selection, as well as the Fox News quotes noted above: on August 4, 2008 he listed her among several other possible candidates (at a time when, AFAIK, no one else of Kristol’s prominence was talking her up), and then advised (in French, amusingly enough) that McCain should “cherchez la femme.”  Now, to be fair to Kristol, on August 24 (after Joe Biden was announced as Obama’s VP pick) he did seem to back off Palin a bit (though he continued to treat her gender as a big plus (“how about a woman, whose selection would presumably appeal to the aforementioned anguished Hillary supporters?”)) in favor of Joe Lieberman.  But once McCain actually announced Palin as his choice, and Palin successfully read the speech that had been written for her off the teleprompter, Kristol was ecstatic.

It’s amazing what a bold vice-presidential pick who gives a sterling performance when she’s introduced will do for a party’s spirits….

The Palin pick already, as Noemie Emery wrote, “Wipes out the image of McCain as the crotchety elder and brings back that of the fly-boy and gambler, which is much more appealing, and the genuine person.” But of course McCain needs Palin to do well to prove he’s a shrewd and prescient gambler.

I spent an afternoon with Palin a little over a year ago in Juneau, and have followed her career pretty closely ever since. I think she can pull it off…. Perhaps, as [McCain] pondered his vice-presidential selection, he recalled the advice of Margaret Thatcher: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”

Remarkable, isn’t it, how important Sarah Palin’s gender seems to have been to Kristol?  He keeps talking about it.

Anyway, Kristol then launched into a narrative to which he would return time and time again.  In that same Sept 1 column, he derided “media mandarins” who “were upset” by the Palin choice.  And a week later, on September 7, he devoted his entire column to the subject of the media.

It’s not just that many in the media don’t like her politics and don’t identify with her socially or culturally. They’re offended that McCain picked Palin without, so to speak, consulting them. The establishment media take pride in their role as gatekeeper to our political process and social discourse.

So the gatekeeper media’s reaction has been: Who is Sarah Palin to suddenly show up on the national stage? We didn’t vet her. And we don’t approve of her.

Of course, this is nonsense, since Kristol himself is a member of the “gatekeeper media,” and he did approve of her.  What’s really going on here is that Kristol is beside himself with glee because, in effect, he scooped his fellow media elites.  He was the only one who was aggressively talking up Palin early on, and he won.  Legitimate questions being raised about her (which would later prove prescient) were, in Kristol’s mind, simply sour grapes.

In that column, he also found time to mention yet again that Sarah Palin is female.

One thing McCain undoubtedly had in mind was Obama’s failure to pick Hillary Clinton. As The Times’s Patrick Healy reported Friday, “If the election remains close, the next president could very well be picked by what Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist, calls ‘Wal-Mart Moms’ – white working women with children living in the exurbs and in rural parts of battleground states. …”

McCain didn’t just pick a politician who could appeal to Wal-Mart Moms. He picked a Wal-Mart Mom…. A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. And some – perhaps a decisive number – will say, It’s about time.

Well, most Wal-Mart Moms don’t have national political parties shelling out $150,000 for their wardrobes, but never mind.

Of course, as we know, things didn’t go so well for Palin, starting just a few days after that Sept 7 column was published.  On September 11, the first excerpts from Palin’s first real interview (with Charlie Gibson) appeared; she was widely thought to have done poorly.  Yet, according to Kristol, it was actually Gibson’s fault.  Kristol wrote on September 14 that the Palin choice “horrified” the “media establishment” (of which he, let us never forget, is a charter member, despite his hilarious claim of actually being a “disestablishmentarian”), which is what led to “the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media
bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student.”

Oh, and by the way, Palin is “the first woman on a Republican ticket.”  In case you’d forgotten.

Alas for Kristol, Palin’s performance in the Gibson interview looked positively flawless compared to her catastrophic interview with Katie Couric, which started appearing on September 24.  Palin’s startling inability to answer even the most obvious questions, and the gibberish that she threw up instead, rocketed around the internet as well as the big media and immediately created an enormous problem for the McCain campaign.  It was becoming painfully obvious to anyone who cared to look that Sarah Palin simply was not qualified for the job of vice president.  

Kristol saw what was happening — you couldn’t miss it.  And so, on September 28, he conceded that his early snap judgment about Palin might have been off the mark insisted that the problems Palin was facing were not her fault, but rather the fault of her handlers.

McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her – aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.

Kristol studiously avoided any mention of the disastrous Couric interview, though he was surely aware of it when he wrote that column.  Instead, he looked ahead to the upcoming debate with Joe Biden, and said this very interesting thing:

In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president.

Here, perhaps, is where Kristol became completely detached from reality.  Because of the Couric interview, there was no way that Palin could “dispatch quickly” the issue of her qualifications.  No one — and certainly not the American people — would settle any longer for Palin’s own assertion that “of course she’s qualified.”  She had gone a long way to proving exactly the opposite in the Couric interview, and she had a lot of work ahead of her to undo the damage.  Kristol’s silly advice reflects his own blinkered view that Palin was a great pick, and that surely folks would see that if they’d just take a few minutes to see the real, unfiltered Sarah Palin, the way he did back in Juneau.

Of course, as we know, she failed.  Record numbers of Americans watched the VP debate, and polls unanimously showed that Biden won it convincingly.  Palin didn’t fall on her face the way she did with Katie Couric, but neither did she do much to convince the American people that she was a person ready to take the country’s number 2 job, to say nothing of number 1.

This placed Kristol in an extremely awkward and embarrassing position.  He had been strenuously pushing for Sarah Palin to be the Republican vice presidential candidate since he met her over a year previously, and it seems fair to say that without his high profile backing — he is, remember, a member of the media elite, and he is not without influence in conservative circles — she might well not have been on the ticket.  Yet Palin was working out very badly.  The YouTubes of Palin/Couric were ubiquitous and damning; she had lost the only vice-presidential debate; and she was the butt of devastating send-ups on Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and elsewhere.  As a result, the McCain/Palin ticket was sinking fast.  Pollster.com shows that, beginning right around the time of the Palin/Gibson interview (Sept. 11), September and early October was an extremely bad month for McCain/Palin, with the polls consistently trending downward.

So Kristol did the only sensible thing.  He finally admitted that he might have been wrong about Sarah Palin He called for a do-over.  Here he is on October 5, after she lost the debate.

Since she seemed to have enjoyed the debate, I asked her whether she’d like to take this opportunity to challenge Joe Biden to another one…. And, really, shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.

There are no words that can adequately describe the absurdity, the blind self-importance, the vanity, of that last sentence.  

Perhaps more importantly, the October 5 column reveals for all to see that Bill Kristol’s top agenda item is Bill Kristol, not John McCain (or even Sarah Palin).  He knew full well that McCain had been on record for months as saying that Jeremiah Wright was off-limits as a campaign topic.  He also knew that, having been as unequivocal as he was, McCain could not possibly reverse course on that without looking like the most desperate flip-flopper ever to run for public office.  It is simply not possible for McCain to change his mind on Wright, as every political observer with any sense knows.

Kristol didn’t care.  To him, it was more important to demonstrate that Palin was failin’ not because she was a lousy candidate whom he never should have backed, but because she was being intolerably hamstrung.

Palin made clear – without being willing to flat out say so – that she regretted allowing herself to be overly handled and constrained after the Republican convention….  I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers – and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more…. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Heckuva job, Billy — you’ve goaded the VP into openly questioning the tactics of the top of the ticket.  The inevitable effect?  An appearance of a campaign in disarray, with its two principals publicly disagreeing over how to deal with a significant tactical issue.  Of course, McCain has stuck to his guns on Wright, as he had to, so Kristol’s broaching the Wright issue with Palin had no effect on campaign strategy.  But Kristol accomplished his personal goal of deflecting responsibility for the Republican collapse in the polls away from Palin herself and toward tactical decisions made by McCain and his staff, even as, in doing so, he simply created more problems for the McCain campaign by coaxing Palin into a public disagreement with them.  With friends like that …

And one more thing from October 5: Palin is a Hockey Mom, and “Hockey Mom knows best.”  Don’t forget — she’s a mom!

In at least one respect, though, the McCain/Palin campaign did seem to take some of Kristol’s advice.  Kristol had been urging attacks on Obama’s character (in his September 29 column he mentioned Wright and Obama’s other “radical associates” as fair game), and there’s no doubt that the McCain/Palin t
eam did a whole lot more of that in early October than they had in September.  Bill Ayers in particular played a starring role during that time.  And on the character assaults, Sarah Palin was leading the charge, as Kristol had seemed to urge her to do.

But it wasn’t working.  McCain/Palin kept sinking in the polls.  And Kristol was no doubt aware of the overall polling as well as the polling showing that Americans’ impression of Palin was steadily declining.

At that point, on October 12, Kristol completely freaked.  I wrote up his freak-out in some detail here, and I won’t repeat that whole discussion.  The bottom line is that Kristol had lost it.  He had jettisoned his previous advice, he had jettisoned any semblance of remaining consistent with what he had already written.  He was instead using his column to blame anyone and everyone for McCain’s sinking poll numbers — excluding Sarah Palin (and by extension himself), of course.

The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic…. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher.

But others saw it differently.  The final insult to Kristol must be that his own beloved conservative commentariat — fellow members of the right-wing division of the media elite — are now in mutiny against the Palin choice.  Led by Kathleen Parker at the National Review, who in late September called for Palin to quit the race, others like David Brooks (“a fatal cancer to the Republican Party”) and Peggy Noonan (“a mark against John McCain”) have more recently followed suit in openly criticizing the Palin pick, declaring as an obvious fact that she is unqualified, and acknowledging McCain’s failure in judgment in choosing her.  

If they are right, then Kristol failed as well.  Palin was his personal project.  He succeeded in getting her on the ticket, and now the ticket was in free-fall, in large part because Palin was on it.  At this point, it seems that even Kristol cannot bear to mount yet another defense of Palin, instead simply saying on October 20 that he “doesn’t share” the assessment of his conservative colleagues.  Rather, he has retreated into full-blown absurdity — one cannot but help picture him curled up in the fetal position on the floor of his study after reviewing Palin’s ever-declining approval ratings, his fingers protruding just enough to reach the keyboard of his laptop.  In his October 20 column, Kristol announced that he was “taking his stand with Joe the Plumber,” even though Kristol is a media elite par excellence who lives in the NY-DC corridor, who surely makes hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year, and who spends his life frequenting the very New York and D.C. cocktail parties that faux populists like McCain enjoy deriding.  Kristol went on to disown “Horace the Poet” — whom he had quoted in Latin earlier in the column.  Kristol has virtually nothing in common with Joe the Plumber; he has everything in common with his pals on the cocktail circuit who, like him, can read Horace in the original language (take a moment to recall who Bill Kristol really is — Manhattan upbringing, fancy all-boys prep school, two degrees from Harvard, taught political philosophy at Ivy League schools, worked in the D.C. halls of power (including as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle), and then a member of the media elite).  One of Peggy Noonan’s most trenchant observations in her devastating takedown of Palin was this (emphasis mine):

This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine.

One could say exactly the same about Kristol’s laughable alliance with Joe the Plumber.  Kristol in fact has no idea what Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who may indeed be experiencing hard times, is going through.  That alone does not, of course, make Kristol a bad person.  But it does call into question the sincerity of what Kristol is doing here.  Kristol pushed early, and hard, for Palin to be named VP.  Since then, his choice has been rejected by other “media elites,” rejected by the American people (at least according to the polls), and finally rejected by many of his own conservative colleagues.  Kristol’s faux alliance with Joe the Plumber, as set forth on the NY Times op-ed page, is really just Kristol giving the finger to Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and the rest of the gang who just somehow can’t see the woman that Kristol thought he saw all those months ago in Juneau.  If Kristol wants to flip those guys off, that’s fine, but the NY Times shouldn’t be publishing it.  Let him do it the next time he sees them at a cocktail party.

Through all of this, ironically, Kristol was absolutely right about one thing — just not in the way he expected.  Kristol himself is as much of a media elite as anyone, yet he fell for Palin’s act hook, line, and sinker.  But the American people saw right through her.  Sure enough, sometimes the people really do know better.