Welcome To The Village, Alan

As Digby points out, Alan Wolfe of the WaPo reviews Game Change and discovers the real story is our broken Village media.

For all that, however, "Game Change" inadvertently confirms just how many of our top political journalists really are Villagers, even if, in the case of these two, they live in New York. (Washington -- and especially Georgetown -- is the small town the bloggers have in mind.) For one thing, Heilemann and Halperin write about the campaign as if they were not active participants in shaping it. At one particularly inane moment during the debates, for instance, Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself being grilled over whether illegal immigrants ought to have New York driver's licenses. Compared with terrorism or the coming economic catastrophe, this was not the most burning question. The media focus on this kind of issue is precisely what the liberal bloggers gripe about; surely, they insist, our politics does not have to be this trivial.

Heilemann and Halperin's response? "The press always wants a race. The press always loves conflict." This highlights a problem in the authors' perspective. If they consider themselves part of this press that wants to create a race through their reporting, at the expense of examining the issues, then they share responsibility for trivializing campaigns.

Heilemann and Halperin also purvey a lot of material in stenographic fashion, which only feeds into the complaints of their critics. Joe Biden tells them that he really did not want to be vice president, and they write that down, as if Biden actually was content just to ride Amtrak back and forth to Delaware as a senator. In the authors' account, Biden was not the only one reluctantly drawn into national service: Hillary Clinton worried about her daughter, both Obamas were concerned about Sasha and Malia, and Cindy McCain hated the limelight.

Wolfe ends with the following, which is about as close to an apology to bloggers like Digby and John Cole and Atrios as you're going to get:

I read the bloggers and, while I admire their energy and commitment, I often find their near-hysteria off-putting. When they write about the Villagers, I detect, if not jealousy, then smugness, as if they believe they could do a better job than the journalists who take home the big bucks. As someone who grew up reading great political reporting, even the kind that produced the classic campaign books of previous years, I wish that all those who scoff about insular and un-self-critical Villagers would be proven wrong. It is too bad that Heilemann and Halperin have proved them, by and large, right.

You're welcome.  And you're right.  There are bloggers who can do a better job and have been doing a better job on a daily basis and have been for years.  You might want to give them some credit once in a while. The triviality and banality of our political discourse is how the Village controls and shapes the narrative, and it's still going on today.  Witness today's special election in Massachusetts.  It was never about lack of the public option or policy or anything substantive.  It was about curling irons, a truck with 200,000 miles on it, and Curt Shilling.  Most importantly, it was about shaping the narrative that Obama and the Democrats had already lost the race even if the voters declared they won, and doing so weeks before the actual election.

There's a problem with that.  It didn't end because Campaign '08 did.  Your Villager buddies are still out there doing everything you're so frustrated at, Alan.  They're actually worse now, all but declaring Obama a lame duck with three years left in his term and that it doesn't matter.

Admission of the problem is the first step, as they say.  But it's not Heilimann and Halperin proving the bloggers are right about the Village, it's the entire Village.  Keep that in mind.