The thing about reality shows is that, no matter how much you try to script them, once in a while reality actually seeps in.
The political news this morning has been focused on the endorsement by the New York Times Editorial Board of, and I’m going to quote them here because there is no coherent way to explain this otherwise:
Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it. That’s why we’re endorsing the most effective advocates for each approach. They are Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
This split endorsement was a laughable letdown after the NYT held a televised, highly promoted, “most transparent endorsement ever” extravaganza to announce their endorsement. But, hey, they can do what they want. Before choosing their candidate(s), the board met with each candidate and they uploaded 30,000 words worth of transcripts from those meetings (which can be found here). FX’s “The Weekly” condensed those meetings into a few minutes of each candidate in an hour-long episode that minus the failed landing was actually pretty informative and creative.
The last candidate they interviewed was, of course, Joe Biden: former VP, former senator, and frontrunner in this campaign from the moment he entered it. I will hold up my hand and admit I’ve not been impressed with how Joe has played his hand in this campaign. Gaffe prone, with 40 years of votes and positions that would be problematic to the progressive base, and a history of two presidential campaigns that imploded under mistakes ranging from horrible campaigning to plagiarism, I didn’t think Joe Biden was the man for the moment. I even wrote back in April, right before he jumped in and I was frankly hoping he wouldn’t, about the concerns with him making a third attempt at the White House:
If you want to wager that — in what will be hours of footage per day for the next 10 months until voting starts — we can go without a major Joe Biden gaffe or controversy, you are betting against time, tide, and 70+ plus years of recorded history on the man.
Well, Joe is still Joe: gaffe prone and with plenty of controversy in his background. But, so far, while the voters have kicked the tires on a few other candidates, they keep coming back to Joe. His poll numbers are, for all practical purposes, right where they were when this all started last April. A large group within the Democratic party doesn’t care or, more to the point, doesn’t think they have a different, better option.
But while the New York Times Editorial Board was not impressed with Joe Biden, the security guard in the elevator was.
Could the Biden campaign have asked for better optics than this: an ordinary worker gushing over him while the New York Times editorial board decides to not put him in their top four choices? pic.twitter.com/5fBj4EoxwO
— Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) January 20, 2020
The New York Times Editorial Board had a large conference table in a big room with the New York City skyline as the background. It had very serious people thinking very seriously about their very serious endorsement. It was weeks, if not months, in the making and culminated in an edited-for-TV hour of very serious discussion. And it’s been obliterated by 20 seconds of viral video that, as of this writing, has been viewed six times more than the videos of the Grey Lady’s endorsed candidates. Both of them. Combined.
We don’t know much about the lady in the elevator, and I hope to God the media leaves her alone. But, because of how she reacted and talked, I’ll bet she is exactly the kind of person who is going to stand in line to vote. Unlike the folks around the fancy table, she wasn’t moved by high minded ideological arguments, or how her choice might look to other people, or how she might influence others. She just looked at Joe Biden and said things like “I love you…I really do” and “You’re my favorite” and a thankful “You are awesome” to Joe asking her name and telling her they would get a picture together. This is Retail Politics 101 from someone who has done it their entire life.
Most of this hubbub about the New York Times endorsement will fade by the end of the day. Their gimmicky silliness — picking two candidates and hand waving “may the best woman win,” when everyone who has bothered to watch the coverage of this race at all knew the pick of that group of folks was going to be Warren — was yesterday’s news by noon.
But moments like that elevator scene, in a race that has precious little real moments in it, will resonate more. For a candidate like Joe Biden, who has been coasting on inertia and a field too weak to mount a serious challenge, little moments like that are all some folks will need to go with what they are comfortable with in a very uncomfortable political season.
Jaybird! You found your excited person!Report
Yes!
See? That’s the sort of thing that moves votes. And Holly Otterbein is 100% right about the optics.Report
Thinking about it, maybe this won’t move votes (because this story doesn’t seem to be getting any play).
But if I wanted to ask the question like “why didn’t the base get out there for X?” after an election that I was 99% sure would go for X, I’d look at stuff like this and how much of it there was for X and how much of it there was for Y.Report
It probably won’t move votes, but it does give a snippet view into the non-online people who like Joe Biden, like, alot.
That is a class of person too long hypotheticised but missing from the discussion for a long while now.Report
good piece! I didn’t know about that.Report
Thank you KristinReport
Just to clarify, this is their endorsement for the primary? Or the general? People (at least people here… this is the only place I’m reading about it) are talking about this like it is the latter but I’m pretty sure it is the former.Report
The New York Times had a dual endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the primary. (We discussed that here.) But you’re right. That’s not their general election endorsement.
That said, I am 99% sure that their general election endorsement will be whomever happens to show up and get the nomination. Even if it’s Bernie.
(Well, if it’s Bernie, drop me down to 95% sure.)Report
That’s what I thought. Which makes it interesting that in that thread you linked to the Wiki page on their endorsement for the general election.
A few questions…
1) Do they typically make an endorsement for the primary?
2) Does it typically get much fanfare?
3) If the answers to those questions are “yes” and “no” (respectively) than I wonder if this whole shebang was about generating clicks. Which makes them less stupid and more desperate. I’ll leave it to others to form their own opinions on which of those is worse.Report
Huh. There doesn’t seem to be a page devoted to New York Times Primary endorsements.
I found this and this from 2008 (the second one will *SHOCK* you). Which made me wonder… did they endorse any Republicans in 2016? Yes. Yes they did.
They really should have a wiki page for primary endorsements. That would be a gold mine.Report
So a thing that hasn’t even garnered a Wikipedia page suddenly goes off the rails and becomes the story-of-the-day. Color me unimpressed.
You DO know you could just like, create that Wikipedia page, right?Report
Eh, what I think the story of the day part of it is this:
30 votes. 6 of them for someone who had dropped out. 1 of them for Bloomberg.
While, yes, the NYT is representative as hell of a particular variant of Liberal (educated, online, upper half if not upper quarter of SES for the country), it seems to be less representative of other types.
I’d compare to us here, actually.Report
Did anyone convince themselves otherwise?Report
Depends upon your point of view.Report
I’m not sure that dismissing this as nothing-burger is quite accurate.
This was the official NYTimes editorial page endorsement of their preferrend candidate(s) for the Democratic Nomination in an attempt to influence votes.
They announced/revealed it on National Television. Its a thing.
Endorsements are part of the calculus for 538 analysis (among others) and its something oft discussed.
Now, whether its a fading thing, and outdated thing, a meaningless thing or a hapless fling… that’s worth discussing, and we kinda did. But its not a JB idiosyncrasy.Report
My point is not that we should dismiss it as nothing. My point is that it seems that the NYT got a little whacky with their primary endorsement, perhaps to generate buzz. I trust the vote totals as reported. But… there was a winner and yet they opted to announce co-winners? Why? Well, we’re talking about it ain’t we? And they did this TV thing… has that ever been done before? If not, why now?
Had they simply written an Editorial announcing their endorsement of the leading vote getter among their editorial staff (Warren), would we have had nearly this much to say? No, we’d have discussed whether we agreed or disagreed and why. But now we’re discussing the whole shebang because they opted to make a spectacle of it. I’m not going to treat the *spectacle* as a thing beyond the NYT trying to draw more attention to this… for whatever reason.Report
Thanks, I see… welcome aboard, I think we all see the endorsement as wacky – I’m not sure we all agree exactly how its wacky, though.
The spectacle of it all is something I hadn’t really thought about… print moving to video to tik-tok to whatever’s next just seems standard fare these days.Report
If the NYT did what they did to generate buzz, that is also a story in and of itself.
I’m not sure that if that is the story whatever the NYT says tomorrow is necessarily worth paying attention to, though.Report
Wait, I was wrong. We *DID* have a Biden post back in our endorsement symposium.
There might be hope for us yet.Report