There’s been a simmering debate of late in op-ed pages and the blogosphere about the prepoderance of men in the political opinion biz. As an old white guy with no significant influence over who gets to say what in any venue, I figured there was no reason this side of masochism for weighing in, but as a final Lenten discipline, I’ll offer a few scattered thoughts.There are at least three separate issues being kicked around. One is the small number of women represented on the op-ed pages of Big Opinion Leading newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. A second is the male domination of influential but seletively read political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Monthly, etc. And the third is the decisively masculine cast of well-linked and well-supported political blogs.The first two issues, in reality, have to do with the ancient canons of the traditional journalism profession.Op-ed columns in all but the largest circulation newspapers have often served as the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow for that hearty, underpaid tribe of political reporters. (I learned this personally when I tried to make a lateral transfer from government policy work into editorial writing, and was informed that giving me a job would screw up the entire career ladder). Thus, today’s columnists are yesterday’s ink-stained wretches, which means that the Editorial side of the business should eventually catch up with the growing gender balance of the News side.For the Big Papers, though, the problem is that there are so few editorial spots available, and, unlike their smaller competitors, no real market pressure to turn things over. I don’t want to name names, but in my judgment, nearly half of the columnists in the Big Papers, most of them white men, are just filling up space with Left-Right CW that could be, and for all I know, may be written by a computer.That’s why I think an aggressive affirmative action program for Big and Small Paper editorial staffs makes sense, so long as some care is taken to give some protection to those relatively few White Guys, regardless of seniority or connections, who have actually expressed an original thought now and then. It shouldn’t be that hard to find them. Perhaps we can have a Survivor-type contest.Political magazines are a different matter, partially because of ideological factors that complicate the usual “professional” issues about bylines. But as Katha Pollit of The Nation points out, some magazines have selection criteria that tend to discriminate against women. Of course, one magazine she fingers, The New Republic, has a reputation for discrimimating against anybody who didn’t get an Ivy League education (which doesn’t keep Un-Ivied me from reading every line). And many magazines discriminate against writers who doesn’t tow the party line, which gives the white guys who’ve been towing this or that party line since adolescence yet another advantage. The only quick way I can imagine to loosen up the magazines is to encourage them to keep losing money, which might in turn encourage them to diversify their voices, in many cases by tapping the more diverse voices they already feature in online editions.And then, ah yes, there’s the blogosphere, where the gender bias can’t exactly be blamed on Old Guys like me, since the median age of notable bloggers is about 25. And here there is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, since the demographic of inveterate blog readers seems to echo the smart-ass-white-boy demographic of blog writers.But the good thing about blogs is that for all the complaining about sponsors and back-scratching links and mainstream infestation, any woman can get out there and compete, and the recent effort to get more notice for female bloggers is an example of healthy market-based initiative.Personally, I’m paralyzed by ignorance and inertia from providing blogroll links to much of anybody I didn’t know about when I started this thing last fall. If that means I’m paying less attention to wo-bloggers than I should it’s certainly not a matter of bias; I’ve long considered myself a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. So I’m more than happy to discover and link to women who share my general point of view, and/or have something distinctive to say.In the end, the best way for women to get their fair share of the bloviating biz is for us all to push for a meritocracy that elevates talent and a distinctive voice over “representantive” versions of the same old Left-Right CV. And unfairly but inevitably, women will earn those prized high-profile journalistic gigs by performing at a level that makes bias or tokenism or role-playing irrelevant. It will require, in the words of Lucinda Williams, “real live bloody fingers and broken guitar strings.”UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 26: DeSantis Stumbles Out of the Gate
Like everyone else, I listened to DeSantis’s botched Twitter Spaces launch, but then reached some conclusions about the trajectory of his campaign at New York:
Before long, the laughter over the technical glitches that marred Ron DeSantis’s official presidential campaign launch with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces will fade. We’ll all probably look back and place this moment in better perspective. Political-media folk (not to mention DeSantis’s Republican rivals and Democratic enemies) tend to overreact to “game changing” moments in campaigns when fundamentals and long-term trends matter infinitely more. Relatively few actual voters were tuned in to Twitter to watch the botched launch, and even fewer will think less of DeSantis as a potential president because of this incident.
It mattered in one respect, however: The screwed-up launch stepped all over a DeSantis campaign reset designed to depict the Florida governor as a political Death Star with unlimited funds and an unbeatable strategy for winning the GOP nomination. The reset was important to rebut the prevailing story line that DeSantis had lost an extraordinary amount of ground since the salad days following his landslide reelection last year, when he briefly looked to be consolidating partywide support as a more electable and less erratic replacement for Donald Trump. For reasons both within and beyond his control, he missed two critical strategic objectives going into the 2024 race: keeping the presidential field small enough to give him a one-on-one shot at Trump and keeping Trump from reestablishing himself as the front-runner with an air of inevitability about a third straight nomination.
To dissipate growing concerns about the DeSantis candidacy, the top chieftains of his Never Back Down super-PAC let it be known earlier this week that they had a plan that would shock and awe the political world, based on their extraordinary financial resources (fed by an $80 million surplus DeSantis transferred from his Florida reelection campaign account). The New York Times wrote up the scheme without questioning its connection to reality:
“A key political group supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.
“The effort is part of an on-the-ground organizing operation that intends to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day, an extraordinary number of people for even the best-funded campaigns….
“The group said it expected to have an overall budget of at least $200 million.”
In case the numbers didn’t properly document the audacity of this plan, Team DeSantis made it explicit. The Times report continues:
“‘No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it,’ said Chris Jankowski, the group’s chief executive. ‘This has just never even been dreamed up.’” …
At the helm of the DeSantis super PAC is Jeff Roe, a veteran Republican strategist who was Mr. [Ted] Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016. In an interview, Mr. Roe described an ambitious political apparatus whose 2,600 field organizers by the fall would be roughly double the peak of Senator Bernie Sanders’s entire 2020 primary campaign staff.
Clearly opening up the thesaurus to find metaphors for the extraordinary power and glory of their plans, one DeSantis operative told the Dispatch they were “light speed and light years ahead of any campaign out there, including Trump’s.”
Now more than ever, DeSantis’s campaign will have to prove its grand plans aren’t just fantasies. Those doors in Iowa really will have to be knocked. Thanks to Trump’s current lead, DeSantis will absolutely have to beat expectations there and do just as well in New Hampshire and South Carolina before facing an existential challenge in his and Trump’s home state of Florida. And while DeSantis had a good weekend in Iowa recently, picking up a lot of state legislative endorsements even as Trump canceled a rally due to bad weather that never arrived, he’s got a ways to go. A new Emerson poll of the first-in-the-nation-caucuses state shows Trump leading by an astonishing margin of 62 percent to 20 percent. And obviously enough, Iowa is where DeSantis will likely face the largest number of rivals aside from Trump; he’s a sudden surge from Tim Scott or Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or even Vivek Ramaswamy away from a real Iowa crisis.
Door knocking aside, a focus on Iowa, with its base-dominated caucus system and its large and powerful conservative Evangelical population, will likely force DeSantis to run to Trump’s right even more than he already has. The newly official candidate did not mention abortion policy during his launch event on Twitter; that will have to change, since he has a crucial opportunity to tell Iowa Evangelicals about the six-week ban he recently signed (similar, in fact, to the law Iowa governor Kim Reynolds enacted), in contrast to Trump’s scolding of the anti-abortion movement for extremism. DeSantis also failed once again to talk about his own religious faith, whatever it is; that will probably have to change in Iowa too. He did, however, talk a lot during the launch about his battle against the COVID-19 restrictions the federal government sought to impose on Florida even during the Trump administration. That will very likely continue.
The glitchy launch basically cost DeSantis whatever room for maneuvering he might have enjoyed as the 2024 competition begins to get very real — less than eight months before Iowa Republicans caucus (the exact date remains TBD). He’d better get used to spending a lot of time in Iowa’s churches and Pizza Ranches, and he also needs to begin winning more of the exchanges of potshots with Trump, which will only accelerate from here on out. All the money he has and all the hype and spin his campaign puts out won’t win the nomination now that Trump is fully engaged, and it sure doesn’t look like the 45th president’s legal problems will represent anything other than rocket fuel for his jaunt through the primaries. So for DeSantis, it’s time to put up or shut up.