Tuned In

Dead Tree Alert: Year of the Pundit-Politician

By James Poniewozik | @poniewozik | January 4, 2010 | +

Lou Dobbs has floated a run for Senate (or President), Glenn Beck is touting a “100 year plan” for America, and Sarah Palin gave up running Alaska to go on a book tour. In the latest print TIME, my Tuned In column asks whether, in this midterm election year, a media platform may be a better route to political power than, like, actually being in office and running things.

Arguably, media figures like Dobbs, Palin and Beck are engaged in a kind of unofficial primary for the leadership of the populist, libertarian, anti-tax Tea Party movement. That’s an attractive position in 2010 since, as I note in the column, recent polls have found that if there were an actual “Tea Party” party, it would be more popular than the GOP.

Which raises another interesting media-and-politics question. It would be ironic, given how often Fox News is called an arm of the Republican party, if it turns out that by having so heavily promoted the tea parties it ended up contributing to a schism in the party in the 2010 primaries, or laid the groundwork for a third party in 2012 that could draw heavily from the GOP. In any case, it’s looking like an interesting midterm election year, on TV above all.

Related Topics: dead tree alert, politics

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  • Tom Shaw

    “It would be ironic… if it turns out [Fox] ended up contributing to a schism…”

    Frankly, I find your worries unlikely. While it is the peculiar feature of American politics that voters essentially vote for coalitions (Republicans are Huckabeean Christian Democrats, Business Laissez Faires, Dobbsean Nativists, and others), it’s the Democrats that are currently busy trying to shoot down their own single biggest achievement of the year (if not this presidential cycle).

    As long as primaries cater to the base and the general election to the electorate as a whole, this sort of internal squabbling will always form in non-voting years – and fade just as quickly come the general election.

  • http://twitter.com/poniewozik James Poniewozik

    True, and as long as the coalitions *hold*, that works. But when Democrats lost, say, suburban blue-collar union types like I knew in Michigan, they lost to Reagan. Conversely last year in NY state, the GOP lost a solidly Republican district when a liberal Republican was basically primaried out by the Conservative “tea party” candidate, who (barely) lost to the Democrat.

    Anyway, the Dems have their own problems with their coalition, and I am certainly making no predix about the midterm: beyond my pay grade. I just think it’s an interesting phenomenon that in this tug-of-war over the GOP, the Tea Party side seems to overlap so closely with the media/pundit/Fox News part of the party.

  • doubleang

    I dunno; Ive said it before: I think media figures and pundits have a good shot at something like Senate or Congress, or maybe even the vice presidency, but the Oval Office seems unlikely to me.
    In your article you state, “a title without accountability”, which is true, but also a liability. The media these days has far too much bias. They tend to make too many outlandish statements which are immediately recorded for posterity.
    Biden can get away with a dumb comment or two, but presidential candidates are held to a higher level of scrutiny. If Obama gets in trouble for any number of perceived racial slights and the occassional ninja-fly swat, I would hate to see how some of the downright inflammatory comments media pundits make play out when re-broadcast to voters.

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