The latest issue of Vanity Fair offers up a profile of Politico, the wildly successful, wildly comprehensive Washington D.C. based website/newspaper devoted to so called "inside the beltway" politics in the Excited States of America. Unlike its vanquished rivals in the traditional media, Michael Wolff writes, Politico provides "more information than you want to know, as well as more than you probably should know and can know, altering the very metabolic rate of the people who supply it and of those who become habituated to trying to know it."
Oh dear. If that's the standard to which political coverage on the web must aspire, I am in serious trouble. Here I've been looking to throw down the odd rant, solicit a couple of laughs and mock whenever possible Peter Kent's gringo musings on the Honduran calamity.
That said, Wolff's point is well taken. Politico is the state of the art in web-based journalism born of a happy coincidence of technology and history. Wolff sites Michael Crichton's observation - from the early '90s - that "newspapers were doomed because they were too dumb. As information became cheaper, more plentiful, and easier to get, consumers … would become ever more immersed in their specific interests and understand that their more generally oriented paper - at least in the matter of a reader's special interest, but also by inference everything else - had no idea what it was talking about."
Moreover, as Wolff writes, political journalism was particularly vulnerable since:
For two generations - since Watergate, let us say - politics has been about opposing Washington. The true modern American ideology was to believe that the federal government, if not evil, was grossly ineffective and pathetically out of touch. Practicing politics, or writing about it, was a job not for the best and brightest but for the narrow-minded and obtuse. Even Washington reporters, once the zenith of the trade, became stodgy relics. Washington was not even the center of power - finance, media, and technology had much more immediate effects on people's lives than government did. A whole language grew up to characterize the oddness, and the emotional limitations, of the Beltway-centric: "wonks" or, their own, self-loathing favorite, "political junkies" or, that most merciless characterization of Washington, "Hollywood for the ugly." Even cable television, with its left and right divide, was not interested in politics per se, or in Washington, but in the clash of opposing sides. Nobody, except the wonks, was interested, except to deride it, in the civics-class culture of insider relationships, horse-trading, and compromise that most obsesses political professionals.
But, all of a sudden, the politician as player, politics as the art of the astute, Washington as the true Hollywood of billion-dollar deals and iconic careers, are back. This is because of Barack Obama (not just a star, but the first senator - i.e., Washington insider - to be elected president since J.F.K.), and because the economic crisis has centered so much wealth in Washington -and because of Politico.
On a slightly less exalted scale, I would suggest that the Globe is in its way engaging in somewhat the same activity at this very site. There's not a lot of throat-clearing hereabouts. The reporting, debates and discussions are at their best like a good conversation. The participants end and begin each other's sentences without apology.
That said, there's still the odd thing that puts me more in mind of Crichton's dictums. Ferinstance, today in the Globe, John Ibbitson writes:
Canada always struggled to define itself as a nation, and in recent years appears to have given up that struggle, retreating into regional isolation. What Canadian federal politician has a clear sense of what this country should look like in the 21st century?
Politics in America is loud, rude, messy and sometimes deeply weird. But at least the U.S. matters to its citizens.
Do we keep quiet because of our famous politeness? Or is it that we just don't care?
Oh, please. Any politician that stood up in a room in Canada and said "I have a clear sense of what this country should look like in the 21st century" should and probably would be laughed off the stage for his or her hubris/presumption. We aren't the nation of manifest destiny. That's why we don't engage in lethal, unprovoked mass military operations whose purpose is to reassert same.
Rather, we are muddlers through. And we take that very seriously, thank you very much.