"Raising the bar on the media rat race"

Michael Kinsley (Politico):

Determined to be the website with the most and fastest coverage of presidential politics and in responding to reports, such as one in The New York Times on Sunday that said the 2012 election may be the most over-covered presidential contest yet, POLITICO announced that it has decided to skip the 2012 election cycle entirely and to concentrate its resources on 2016.

“The 2016 presidential race begins today,” POLITICO Executive Editor Jim VandeHei said in a webcast press conference from the company’s headquarters at a secret address — 1100 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, Va. Asked whether the lack of candidates would be a problem, VandeHei insisted that “candidates play a less and less significant role in American politics, especially at the presidential level. By the time we have finished covering the political consultants and advisers, then throw in a poll or two, there is really no need to talk to the candidates themselves. Our best scientific evidence is that, while the candidates may still have some vestigial role in 2012, by 2016 they will largely have disappeared, except for purely symbolic activities like posing for pictures [while] coming out of church with their families.” By 2020, VandeHei said, even those will be fabricated. “We project [that] the lack of any official candidates, while it may be a problem for media attempting to cover the 2012 election, will be an anachronistic worry by 2016 and a question on ‘Jeopardy!’ by 2020.” Even today, “Have you seen what you can do with Photoshop?” VandeHei asked. “It’s incredible.”

“Our readers need to stay ahead of the game,” said POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris. “Two years from now, the 2012 election will be history, and so will all the coverage of it. You’ve got to think ahead in this business.” Harris added, with the brio that has come to symbolize POLITICO’s rise among the Washington media, that the company has the necessary resources for the job: “In 2008, we were just a couple of potheads with a dream. In 2011, we’re an amateur production of ‘Oklahoma’ in the high school auditorium. Four years from now, we’ll be an overstaffed bureaucracy like the Department of Homeland Security. We’ll be unstoppable.” MORE...

Howie P.S.: Just snark or deft political satire?

Greg Sargent on Harris/VandeHei on Obama " (Updated)

UPDATE: Sargent also writes, "Dems are winning the larger argument (very, very slowly):"

Public skepticism about government's efficacy in the face of our economic doldrums has made the public receptive to the Republican case that Dems are overreaching and overspending, with nothing to show for it. Dems may sustain large losses in the midterms, and perhaps their travails will continue beyond then.

But more broadly, it's fair to imagine that that the more accomplishments Dems rack up -- energy reform is next, though its prospects are in doubt -- the easier it will be for them to tell the larger story they're trying to tell. The picture of Dems succeeding at what they've set out to do will make it easier for Dems to argue: We're getting things done, and none of the worst case scenarios foreseen by critics are coming to pass.

Greg Sargent:

I'm no blog triumphalist, and some of the debate about Weigel was overblown, but the claim about blogospheric indifference to the midterms is just laughably false. The liberal blogs I read have spent months now engaged in deep debate about the midterm elections, the best ways to limit losses, and what the consequence for the progressive agenda will be if Dems don't figure out how to pull themselves out of their doldrums.

Indeed, amusingly enough, the very argument VandeHarris are criticizing liberal blogs for making -- that the White House has remained captive to a Beltway culture that fetishizes bipartisanship and has failed to seize this historical moment's potential to dramatically expand the boundaries of what's politically possible -- has been central to the liberal bloggers' debate about this fall's elections. MORE...

"You Can Dislike The Beltway Bubble And Still Try To Work Within It"

Greg Sargent:

Everybody is talking about Marc Leibovich’s magazine piece on Politico’s Mike Allen, and I’m definitely a daily reader and a fan of Playbook.

But I wanted to flag this particular nugget in the piece, because it encapsulates something that always creeps into discussions of the Beltway media: The bogus notion that there’s a contradiction afoot when Obama officials show disdain for the Beltway bubble even as they do their best to function within it:

Politico today remains a White House shorthand for everything the administration claims to dislike about Washington — Beltway myopia, politics as daily sport. Yet most of the president’s top aides are as steeped in this culture as anyone else — and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” Harris, Politico’s editor in chief, told me in an e-mail message.

That Politico has been so vilified inside the White House is itself a sign of its entry into “the bloodstream” (another Politico phrase). It is, White House officials say, an indictment of the “Washington mentality” that the city is sustaining Politico and letting it “drive the conversation” to the extent it does. In early March, Axelrod was sitting in his West Wing office, complaining to me about the “palace-intrigue pathology” of Washington and why he missed Chicago. “I prefer living in a place where people don’t discuss the Politico over dinner,” he said.

This sort of talk tends to ilicit snorts of derision from Beltway media insiders. They say the Obama media team is cynically using the Beltway bubble as a foil to position Obama as an outsider. But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Obama administration officials really don’t like the Beltway media’s excesses.

After all, the Obama team, in addition to managing their own careers, are also running the country. And the Beltway bubble’s priorities — the manic 24-hour news cycle, its prioritizing of speed over accuracy, and its obsession with today’s polls and with who’s up and who’s down — really do complicate the act of governing. It’s understandable that the Obama team would come to genuinely dislike the media culture here, while simultaneously trying to do their best to work within it and, yes, manipulate it.

Politico has plenty of virtues — the big picture pieces, the relentless reporting on the internals of Congress, the bloggers who frequently break useful news, etc. — but parts of it really do encapsulate, to a disproportionate degree, the Beltway bubble’s excesses. I doubt its editors would even contest that. Once members of the Obama team leave the administration and start up their own consulting firms, perhaps they’ll be begging for their own Politico profiles. But for now, it seems obvious that they genuinely dislike the influence the excessive aspects of Politico are having on the discourse. It makes their jobs more difficult. And their jobs are pretty important right now.

*************************************

Update: A colleague points out that the press’ job isn’t to make governing officials’ lives easier. True enough. Just saying that there’s a difference between making officials’ lives harder with aggressive reporting designed to hold them accountable and making them harder by prioritizing speed over accuracy or obsessing over “palace intrigue.”

Howie P.S.: I wish "everybody" was talking about how Wall Street and the banksters ripped the rest of us off, but they aren't, and won't (with conviction) anytime soon. Jason Linkins (HuffPo) reviews the Liebovich piece ("Mike Allen Profile: We Read The NYT Magazine's Politico Piece So You Don't Have To") and offers this descriptive prose about Politico and by extension, Mike Allen:

Basically, Politico takes some crap, shines it up, gets a legion of followers to inflate the empty bubble, bets against it, watches it pop, and then cashes in on whatever micro-transactions they can grub up in terms of pageviews and "influence" (less a verb than the root form of a noun!). Basically, the Magnetar model of journalism!