John Podhoretz: My Columns Were Perfect, Perfect! If Not for That Meddling Electorate!
Jonathan Chait… had a good deal of sport at my expense…. [My] article[s]… after Election Day sounded an entirely different note about the technical brilliance of the Obama campaign than columns I’d written before Nov. 6…. But does Obama’s victory suggest… that I and others were simply… unprincipled right-wing hacks and cheerleaders?… I genuinely believed over the spring and summer that the economic news would make the president’s re-election nearly impossible…. Chait also quotes me changing my tune on Romney’s vague general-election strategy…. The problem here is that there could have been no other strategy…. [P]olls feature wildly varying results that serve to support wildly opposing points of view. So all we’re left with are subjective observations…. This year I argued Barack Obama wouldn’t win… based on experience… knowledge — years of study of electoral and presidential politics… common sense… [and] conviction…. I was wrong this year not only about the technical superiority of the Obama campaign but also about the nature of the American electorate…. That was not hackery. It was, alas, misplaced idealism.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
