Step right up and vote for that "transparent faker" Willard Inc. and the unknowable contents of his campaign Mystery Box

Uh-uh, no peeking! You're not supposed to know what your next president is hiding in his Mystery Box. That's the whole idea. The thing is, you don't need to know.


"Everyone could see [Romney] was a faker and could accept that because he was such a transparent faker. It's the polished faker who scares politicians, master fakers like Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson."

-- Russell Baker, in his contribution to NYRB's
election symposium in the November 8 issue

"Here is the Romney strategy: since you don't like what you've got, vote for what you haven't got. Whatever it is you haven't got, it is better than what you've got. . . . [T]he Romney campaign is taking what-you-haven't-got-ism to new heights of what-you-mustn't-know-ism. It supposes that revealing any details of what you haven't got will just distract from the fact that you haven't got it. . . . So we are supposed to vote for a big Mystery Box full of things we haven't got."

-- Garry Wills, in his contribution

by Ken

I've been trying to figure out how to clue you in to the New York Review of Books's election symposium in the generally remarkable November 8 issue. The individual pieces, by 13 contributors including a number of the magazine's most prized regulars, don't even have titles. They're just interspersed through the issue in four groups, which you will now be able to access directly online via this little guide (with apologies for the woefully inadequate summaries):

I.

Michael Tomasky on the mangled politics of the coming four years ("If Obama wins, we will see a battle within the Republican Party the likes of which we’ve not witnessed in modern history. . . . And if Romney wins, which Romney will govern?").
Elizabeth Drew on the prospects for a second Obama term ("[Q]uite remarkably, Obama lost the definition of the health care bill he was battling to get through Congress. . . . A second term will show us how much he learned from his first one").
Cass R. Sunstein, former White House regulation overseer, on the thousands of rules and regulations issued by the Obama administration and their fate at the hands of the future federal judiciary ("Of course it is true that the 2012 presidential election will help to establish the meaning of the Constitution. Perhaps equally important, it will help to establish the fate of numerous rules designed to protect public safety, health, and the environment").

II.

Frank Rich on the descent to 2016 ("As a retail campaigner, Romney’s human skills fall somewhere between those of Richard Nixon and Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey").
David Cole on national security and human rights ("Of course, President Obama has not exactly been a beacon of light on such critical rule-of-law issues as transparency and accountability . . . Still, as the latest 'torture memo' illustrates, President Romney would be far worse").
Ronald Dworkin on the stakes for constitutional law ("The record of the Roberts Court is already one of the worst in our history. . . . Perhaps it is impossible to make independent voters alert to these dangers. If so, that is a shame").
Russell Baker on the candidate the Republicans hate but were stuck with ("The nine [presidential wannabes] who took the stage for the Republicans' first televised debate reminded all America that ours is not a great age for producing statesmen"), for which they hated him even more ("Many obviously hated him for being inescapable, but what could be done?").

III.

Darryl Pinckney on Willard and the politics of ethnic division ("Romney's kind control the country's wealth, but they cannot get back in charge, psychologically, and this induces a kind of mania in people like John Boehner and the Koch brothers . . . . Such white folk cannot forgive Obama for winning in the first place").
David Bromwich, the Yale English professor, on invisible campaign issues ("Obama clearly believes that political democracy cannot survive in the face of extreme and widening economic inequality. Unless he finds a way of saying so without embarrassment, his largest differences with Romney will seem to the uninformed a matter of recondite details").
Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton on the likelihood of wrongly learned lessons from Obama's first term ("Administrations are often credited with initiatives that were really undertaken by their predecessors. . . . The problem is that if the wrong person gets the credit, we learn the wrong lesson").

IV.

Steven Weinberg, the Nobel physicist, on the disappointments of the Obama first term ("If I lived in a swing state like Ohio or Florida, I would doubtless swallow my disappointment and vote for Obama. In any case, I would not allow disappointment with Obama to keep me from voting for truly liberal candidates for Congress, such as Elizabeth Warren").
Garry Wills on the "Mystery Box" Willard has chosen to ask voters to vote for ("The strategy of no full disclosure at the top of the campaign silently meshes with the party of no full confession below. Under all the other hidden things, the Mystery Box is hiding a lethal level of radioactive racism").
Jeffrey Sachs on the insanity, built into our political system, of operating the U.S. government, "the world’s largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers," and "also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world’s largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more" without any kind of planning beyond our day-to-day seat-of-the-pants partisan brinksmanship.


JEFFREY SACHS'S PIECE MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT,
BUT REGULAR READERS WON'T BE SURPRISED . . .

. . . that it's Garry Wills's I want to spotlight now. (However, I reserve the right to return to Sachs's, or to any of the others, for that matter.)

At the top of this post I've already introduced Garry W's idea of the "big Mystery Box full of things we haven't got" which is the core of what Willard Inc. is asking voters to vote for. Let's have him explain a bit.

Ann Romney, asked about abortion, said she could not address that since it would just be a distraction from the promised great economy (what we haven't got). Asked about her husband's tax returns, she said two years are all we are going to get (leaving all other years among the things we haven't got). Romney himself, asked what loopholes he would eliminate to fund his great new plans, said telling us that would cheat Congress of the wonderful surprise of working with him on the problem.

His views on voter-identification drives to reduce the electorate? A distraction. On requiring ultrasound exams for pregnant women seeking abortions; on "legitimate rape"? Just distractions, all of them. So, for that matter, is whatever he did at Bain Capital, or as governor of Massachusetts. The main thing we are supposed to advert to or be reminded of in his past is that he "saved the Olympics."

Even Romney's strong first debate was simply a harder emphasis on what you've got (falsely, a doubling of the deficit) and what-you-mustn't-know-ism (what deductions will be eliminated and how this will reduce the deficit) -- which Romney got away with because the president inexplicably let him limit the discussion to those terms. All the things Romney treated as "distractions" -- women's rights, gay rights, citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the 47 percent of moochers -- Obama treated as if they were indeed distractions. But they are not, and that should become clear by the election.

Even the selection of right-wing love god Paul Ryan was configured into the Mystery Box format.

[T]here was an expectation that Ryan would pop out like a jack-in-the-box, filling the air with numbers like confetti. He was the party's great thinker; he would make the campaign serious and nerdy; he would blind with pure intellect his Elmer Fudd vice-presidential rival. He would turn his Ayn Rand death ray on him and Biden would evaporate. But as soon as Ryan was asked for his great specific plans, he was told that he could not violate his master's secrecy campaign, and Jack was stuffed back into the box.

Garry points out, "We have seen this kind of mystery election before."

In the elections of 2010, we were told that the Tea Party candidates arriving on the scene would eliminate the deficit and shrink the government, somehow. Other issues were set aside. Abortion, gay rights, religion in politics -- those were all part of the old religious right, now supplanted by the deficit purists. But in a great bait and switch, the first thing the new people in Congress, the state houses, and state legislatures did was introduce a flood of bills to limit, stigmatize, or eliminate abortions, and the flood has not abated -- 944 provisions on abortion or contraception were still being introduced into state legislatures during the first three months of 2012.

"The mass of voters," Garry points out, "did not choose that."

There was no way it could. No one knew what was in the 2010 version of the Mystery Box. In the same way, if we vote for "the economy only" Republicans, the old causes will again race to the top of their agenda -- challenges to women's rights, gay rights, global warming, religious education, and Supreme Court nominees. All of a sudden, other things will not be distractions from the bad economy.

When Willard does get specific, Garry says, it's "a specificity about the non-existent.

He will not apologize for America -- as if that were occurring. He will not cut work requirements from welfare -- and neither has anyone else. He will not take God's name off our coins -- lifting a burden of fear from the beleaguered "Keep God on Our Coins" movement.

"On the other hand, he was very specific about one thing": Anyone who wanted to be his vice presidential running mate would have to produce ten years' worth of tax records.

Romney was too smart to let anyone standing for that office tell him it was none of his business. No one could use mysteries on the Mystery Box candidate. But we are not supposed to be as smart as Romney when it comes to taking risks about important offices. What was required to become a candidate for the vice-presidency is off limits for becoming the president. That is still in the Mystery Box, and it has to stay there.

As with the Teabaggers in 2010, 2012 Willard conceals what's in his Mystery Box by waging "a revulsion campaign . . . rid[ing] the diffuse and partly disguised distrust of Obama."

Romney could explicitly voice only one aspect of this revulsion, Obama's economic performance. But under the vague general feelings about Obama -- reports to pollsters that he is not quite one of us, perhaps not a citizen, not a Christian -- there were radioactive centers too hot for a candidate to handle directly. He could, nonetheless, profit from their broader toxic waves, an unconfessed (sometimes, perhaps, unconscious) force. It was rightly said that a historic boundary had been crossed when a black man was elected president. That breakthrough partly escaped but did not cancel a long sad record of historic American racism. A proof that many were not willing to live with this new level of tolerance is that twice as many conservative Republicans (34 percent) now say that Obama is Muslim as the number who said it when he was elected (16 percent). The number of Republicans in general who say it is 30 percent.

That is not because more evidence has emerged in the last three years, or because the evidence has been more carefully considered. It is because a number of people are digging in their heels even more firmly against where the nation is going. As I say, there is no open racism in the Romney campaign. But it has to be fiercely concentrated on other things (like the economy) to turn its eyes from what sizzles below the surface, and sometimes not very far below.

Dinesh D'Souza's book Obama's America became number one on the New York Times best-seller list, and the film based on it has played in over a thousand theaters, yet its chapter on Obama's mother revives one of the oldest racist stereotypes, that a white woman must be a slut if she has sex with a black man. A "documentary" with that same theme has been mailed to thousands of voters in key states, screened by Tea Party groups and by Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Council. Guess which man the audience for these, and for hundreds of obscurer tracts, will vote for?

Romney, of course, does not cultivate these voters. He does not have to. He does not denounce them, either. He needs them. He cannot disown a third of his party -- and those are only the hard-core Obama revulsionists. Who knows how far the penumbra of softcore revulsionism has spread among the less candid or more cautious harborers of it? The strategy of no full disclosure at the top of the campaign silently meshes with the party of no full confession below. Under all the other hidden things, the Mystery Box is hiding a lethal level of radioactive racism.

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"Authenticity" is the best description I can come up with for the voice of Russell Baker, now applied to the NYT's Jayson Blair scandal

This first volume of memoirs was followed

by the equally remarkable The Good Times.

"The newsroom [Gerald] Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes."

-- Russell Baker, in "A Bad Morning at The New York Times,"

in the April 29 New York Review of Books

by Ken

I acknowledge the likelihood that my responses are exclusively my own, but just as I was, and remain, depressed by the blinkered pomposities of Ross "The Evaluator" Douthat, I stil feel a bit of a tingle at David S. Broder's recollection the other day ofi his days as a young D.C. reporter in the '60s, when "this city was full of people who did their jobs not only with skill and energy but also with unquestioned integrity. We didn't think much about it then, so commonplace was it," and never mind that Grandpappy Dave made kind of a muck-up of his attempted tribute to his three fallen colleague-heroes.

I'm not pretending that the '60s were a golden age in either journalism or civics, but there's something there that rings true, something that has changed distinctly for the worse.

In my non-appreciation of the Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN,* I noted my frosty response to his standing column title, "Evaluations," which strikes me as unbearably (and I do mean unbearably -- I can't bear it, and don't plan to try) pompous and misguided. I suggested that "evaluation" is a function best left to people with a verifiable process for evaluating, like the folks at Consumer Reports or America's Test Kitchen. "Observations," I suggested, would be a less pretentious moniker. (I trusted it would be understood that I think "observing" would be a much more productive use of a columnist's space than "evaluating.") Which led to the observation that Russell Baker's standing column title was "Observer."

Of course Russell Baker would have understood that. It's not that way back when Russell Bakers were a commonplace, overflowing the newsrooms of America, or that nobody today has that kind of stored-up wisdom and authority. Still, back then it seemed less remarkable, and now it seems utterly astonishing -- increasingly hard to find in the bosom of the Infotainment News Media. The names I would put forward today would probably be nearly all bloggers.

Meanwhile, damned if Russell Baker doesn't seem to continue getting even wiser in retirement. His voice has become even more, um, authentic. I don't know how to say it any better, but it really does seem to me an issue of authenticity.

I am relieved to find that reports of Baker's retirement from his periodic forays into book-reviewing for The New York Review of Books have proved overstated. It's one of those that has set me off this evening, a review of former NYT Managing Editor Gerald Boyd's posthumously published My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times." Characteristically, Baker plunges right in:

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all-- the executive editorship-- seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.

I really didn't want to quote that large a block of text, but show me a point at which it would have been possible to break off. In that paragraph I see an astonishing ability to synthesize information and understanding, and it's done in such a way that it comes out in an easy, even, modest, and irresistible flow, without a wasted word, never calling attention to how much you would have to know just to imagine a paragraph like that, and then how much craft you would need to write it. The end product, seemingly (and almost certainly only seemingly) effortless, is a voice that is purest Russell Baker. And I still can't come up with a better description for that voice than "authentic."

Any thought that the writer might have painted himself into a corner with such a dazzling paragraph is dispelled by Baker's second graf, picking up immediately from the abrupt introduction of the subject of Boyd's firing:

The firing occurred in the spring of 2003 in a bizarre seizure of office politics, and, as such things will, it left Boyd anything but well disposed toward his former employer and colleagues. He has written a good book filled with ill feeling toward the Times, many of its editors, and a variety of colleagues who turned against him under pressure or simply because they wanted him to fail and be damned. Written during the three years between his firing and his death from cancer in 2006, the book is now published posthumously with the help of his wife, Robin Stone.

Already I think we know more about this book than we normally expect to find out in a book review, and Baker is just warming up. We know that race is going to be an important subject here. "Times folk," Baker writes, "especially of the management class, will not be delighted by his account of their awkward struggle with the race problem or Boyd's suggestion that bigotry was one of the causes of his downfall."

However, he quickly adds, "There were other causes."

and when all are combined, they present a picture of a runaway newsroom that left the paper's top editorial caste-- and even its owners-- suddenly powerless to control events. In the plainest possible terms, what happened in the newsroom was a successful workers' uprising against the bosses, in which the workers won and the bosses were humiliated.

What may strike the reader as oddest of all about the several curiosities of this rebellion is that it had almost nothing to do with the paper's editorial policy or its news coverage. When it was over, the Times 's news management had changed hands, but the paper went right on being the same New York Times it had been before. What had happened was not a revolution of ideas, but only a great gale of office politics about matters of negligible interest and no conceivable concern to inhabitants of the world outside the Times building.

The precipitating event, of course, was the Jayson Blair scandal, which makes it easy to understand how the racial ugliness found its way into the mix. But the racial ugliness was only one of a number of sources of tension on the part of the highly privileged newsroom staff, which had acquired a status that would have been unimaginable a couple of decades earlier:

Boyd's newsroom was the home office of a journalistic elite class -- college-educated, the sort of people who could chat comfortably with Supreme Court justices, Wall Street finaglers, prime ministers, opera singers, archbishops, sheikhs, crooks, cops, grave robbers, and even an occasional scientist. Bron in the age of American mastery and comfort that followed World War II, they had large ideals and small experience of hardship or need, and, being quite a bit spoiled, they expected to be listened to with more respect than was accorded the working-stiff hotshots who populated newsrooms in the pre-Kennedy years.

That staff was rising against an increasingly embattled management, represented by controversial Executive Editor Howell Raines and the man who put him in that job, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. ("The 'diversity' issue was always the ugly subtext to the dull narrative about a management failure at the Times. 'Diversity' is not a subject for light amusement in America. It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.")

I'm not here to preempt the story, either in Russell Baker's telling or of course in Gerald Boyd's. If you're interested, I trust you'll go to the source(s). I just want to suggest that the story is filled with lessons most of us probably wouldn't otherwise be aware exist, let alone understand.

Example: In RB's view, the Blair affair was both more important than the public understands ("people unaware of the Times's passion for the integrity of its news columns" don't realize what an almost unimaginable betrayal this episode represented) and less important ("it is hard to find the slightest evidence that Blair's plagiarism or fictions affected anyone's life but his own and his editors'").

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*The Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN is more debates, but not just any kind -- he wants the good kind, the kind that are "more substantive" than anything on MSNBC or Fox News, which he considers equivalent. As in the supposed glory years of CNN's Crossfire, or -- the great model to which our Ross apparently thrills -- the William S. Buckley-Gore Vidal debates. Does anyone can recall anything of substance exchanged between Buckley and Vidal? By contrast, I'm confident that anyone who remembers anything about them remembers what salable theater they were. Which recalls the lament from Jon Stewart to the Crossfire gang which set our Ross in motion on the subject: "You're doing theater when you should be doing debate." Hmm.

#

More book notes: (1) Do you write Amazon reviews for the books you've enjoyed? (2) Say it ain't so: No more reviews from the great Russell Baker?

While I'm on this crusade to support the books written by "our" writers, my attention has been called to an unanticipated (by me, anyway) reality of modern-day book publishing: Publishers like to see Amazon reviews. It's possible that quantities of them actually do help sell books, presumably on the theory that prospective book-buyers gain confidence through seeing lots of encouraging reviews. (Isn't this pretty much the way Dickens sold his books? Or maybe not.)

Or it could be that seeing lots of reviews merely boosts the morale of publishers. Apparently they do, and this seems to hold true from the hardiest independents all the way up to the mightiest publishing juggernauts. I don't know about you, but I've never written an Amazon review in my life. I guess I'm going to have to change that.


OH NO, NO MORE RUSSELL BAKER REVIEWS?!

When I proposed Russell Baker as an obvious first choice to review Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, I was still entertaining the hope that he would be doing so in the New York Review of Books, where he has been doing far-too-occasional reviewing for some years now. He has obviously been exceedingly picky about the material he's let himself be persuaded to review (which no doubt has a good deal to do with why each of his reviews is such an occasion), and the subject matter is obviously right up his alley.

I'm afraid my Baker-NYRB fantasy has gone down the drain, though. Rick himself informs me that RB has retired from the book-reviewing gig. Man, if anyone has earned his freedom (and I hope it's a matter of choice on his part), he's it. (Over the years I acquired a small collection of exceedingly gracious replies to gushy fan letters I wrote him. Well, at least two, anyways.) But man, am I depressed!

Give me a moment here, would you?

Okay, I'll do some more moping later, on my time. Meanwhile, I had actually planned to throw out two names from my the top of my list of 100 candidates the NYT Book Review could have considered to review Nixonland before any of the editors should have reached the level of desperation where one of them suggested, however pathetically, "Um, about [mumbling], you know, Will?" (To which the answer in any case should have been, "Don't be stupid, Penrose!")

You know, it occurs to me that it could all have been a sad misunderstanding. Maybe what Penrose mumbled wasn't "Will," but "Wills"! And he was shy about it, not because he thought it was a contemptible suggestion, but because he was surprised, even embarrassed, that nobody higher up on the NYTBR food chain had thought of maybe the foremost political essayist writing today, Garry Wills.

Garry Wills's name, actually, was the other one I meant to propose, and now that's my NYRB fantasy for Nixonland -- for the simple reason that I would love to read that review.

By the way, Rick also informs me that Russell Baker in fact reviewed his first book for NYRB. I don't know how I didn't remember that. Maybe the same way I don't remember more and more of the stuff I once knew. But I offered him belated congratulations -- what a way to launch a book-writing career!

Bookchat: (1) Harry Reid's chat tour brings him to FDL's Book Salon at 5pm ET. (2) The NYTBR gives play to "Nixonland," but assigns it to an idiot.

(1) YES, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, HARRY REID HAS WRITTEN A BOOK!

Which means he's got to do the circuit -- though it may be a slightly cushier circuit when you happen to be the Senate majority leader.

I gather Jon Stewart kind of softballed him on The Daily Show, and last night Keith Olbermann was generally respectful on Countdown. But Keith did at least raise the question of Holy Joe Lieberman.

Harry, as you know, has taken to claiming that Holy Joe "votes with us," meaning Senate Democrats, "on everything but the war." Some of our blogmates have done some tabulating and come up with a long, long list of fairly important issues on which His Holiness has emphatically not voted "with us." Of course it was pointed out that with HH everything is "the war," as indeed it is. Where HH's BFF Chimpy the Prez is fighting a War-unto-Eternity Against Terror, a fight that seems to include a war-to-the-death against civil rights and even democracy itself, our Joe is in the death grip of a one-man War Against Stuff I Don't Like. And indeed in that war he always votes his conscience.

Which leaves one other minor matter on which Holy Joe doesn't exactly vote "with us": this wearying business of his having dismissed the entire Democratic presidential field and endorsed a Republican for president. At this year's Republican National Convention, we can expect Holy Joe to be 2008's Zell Miller.

(Say -- to digress a moment -- if you were Hillary, wouldn't you be just the tiniest bit peeved at your old friend Holy Joe? After all that you and Mr. Hillary did in last year's election to help him slide his carcass back into the Senate, even after he lost the Democratic nomination, he disses you like that? I thought if there was anything Clintons knew how to do, it was hold a grudge.)

Now, Keith did bring up the matter of Holy Joe supporting McCranky of the GOP to Harry. Harry joked about about how "you would ask about that," and talked about the Dems' slender majority, and especially with "Senator Johnson's illness" the even slimmer majority, which on the war (still pretending that it's only on the war that His Holiness votes with the McConnellites) became no majority. Amidst the jovial burbling, there was sort of a hint that with a more security majority, His Holiness's Democratic friends in the Senate may actually start listening to the bilge he blithers. Clearly, though, Harry and his cohorts have to figure out some strategy for dealing with their old pal -- at least by the start of the RNC.

So modest kudos to Keith for putting the question to Harry. More robust kudos to Harry himself for exposing himself to FDL's Book Salon. He can duck the awkward questions if he likes, but you can be sure the FDL questioners will ask them.


(2) IF YOU THINK Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America IS A BOOK OF SOME IMPORTANCE,
WHY ASSIGN THE REVIEW TO A CERTIFIED PUBLIC IGNORAMUS?

It appears that the NYT Book Review is giving major play to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, and it's nice to see that the editors grasp that it's an important book, all 881 pages of it (which doesn't even include the preface!).

Against that, though, is the astonishing fact that somebody at the NYTBR had the brilliant idea of assigning the book to that pompous phony George Will, one of the worst manifestations of Beltway insiderism. Oh, I guess we can sort of see the logic. They turn to a "conservative" reviewer because they've got the idea that this is a "liberal" book.

First, as far as I can tell it isn't a liberal book. It is, rather, an in-depth look at the process whereby the Johnson landslide of 1964 gave way a mere eight years later to the Nixon landslide of 1972, creating the fault lines that have hardened into what we now know as red states vs. blue states. Read the last paragraph of the preface:

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name--but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

And second, George Will isn't a conservative, he's an idiot. Having put in my time trying to read the little shithead, I have no intention of reading his review. Nobody's paying me to, so I don't have to do it.

I'm reliably informed, though, that George declares Rick "juvenile" and "adolescent," but nevertheless describes the book as "compulsively readable." The problem is that when you've been judged juvenile or adolescent by George Will, what has been said? Is the idea that George is "grown-up"? As they say in Yiddish, weh's mir.

Parenthetically, isn't this just the perfect example of why it's so easy to scorn the NYT? Sure, it would be impossible for any newspaper to live up to the exalted reputation that the NYT unaccountably enjoys. The newspaper business is tough, even apart from the increasingly grueling economics of it.

But when the Times blows the easy-as-pie stuff, that's just plain ridiculous. The average village idiot knew that Judith Miller had gone over to the other side and was producing persistently preposterous propaganda for the Bush regime, and you can be sure lots of people inside the paper damn well knew it. How did those smart editors not figure it out until it exploded in their faces? (One answer is provided, as I suggested here recently, by the newspaper plot line in Season Five of David Simon's The Wire.)

I'll bet each of us could think of a hundred writers who could have feasted on Nixonland. I'll just throw out the most obvious: Russell Baker. I don't know whether he would have liked the book, but that's not the issue. Can you imagine Russell Baker guiding us through the turbulence of that eight-year period?

Apparently the editors of the NYTBR can't.

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