Bill Kristol Phones It In

Last week, after the New York Times announced Bill Kristol as the newest addition to its roster of columnists, prompting a predictable (though not necessarily unjustified) mix of outrage and bewilderment among liberals, Jack Shafer rose to the Grey Lady's defense. No need to recite Kristol's many, many faults, we all know what they are. Shafer argued they shouldn't be disqualifying:

Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy…

I can't promise that he'll be good, but he'll be different, he'll be interesting, and I guarantee he'll never be as bad as Roger Cohen.

Fair enough, I thought. I don't read op-eds in order to agree with them, and who knows, maybe time will pardon Kristol for writing well — or at least interestingly.

Well, as you may have seen, Kristol's first offering from atop his new perch is out today, and as it turns out, Kristol, in addition to not being good, wasn't interesting, wasn't different, and was worse than Roger Cohen. Take a look at Kristol's opening paragraphs:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Even if you agree with the sentiment, ask yourself, if you read these lines without knowing their source, would you be more likely to attribute them to (a) a New York Times columnist, or (b) a branch office of the College Republicans? Kristol employs precisely two modes of expression here, the cliched ("a nation turns its grateful eyes," "inquiring minds want to know," "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory") and the hackneyed ("[insert name here] is a liberal Democrat"). The cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the gilding of the lily, the coup-de-grace — or so you might call it — is Kristol's discordant clunker, "After all, for all…." Did anybody read this thing out loud before it went to print?

The column is an even more embarrassing failure in content than in style. As James Fallows points out in the midst of making a writing workshop out of the Kristol piece, "the subject — how the GOP should run against Barack Obama — is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican's views." And the best this well-connected Republican has got is "Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat." The reason this is risible is not that the GOP won't use that as an attack line (they will), and it's not that it will necessarily be ineffective (it's worked before), but that it's no different from what a poorly-connected Republican party functionary would come up with just ad-libbing.

Even Kristol's effort to be a contrarian is phoned in. The larger point of the column — an argument for not writing off Mike Huckabee's viability as a general election candidate — is certainly counterintuitive, and the reason it's counterintuitive is that it's fantastically implausible. Which raises (N.B.: doesn't beg) the question of whether it's plausible to think Kristol actually believes any of this.

Consider: Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses by winning most of the support of the evangelicals who made up 60% of Iowa's Republican electorate, and losing most of the rest of the Republican vote. Kristol, does, presumably, know that the conditions that give Huckabee a leg up in internal Republican politics cap his general election prospects well below 50% (if not, he really ought to read the writers under his aegis). Moreover, since Kristol is discussing Huckabee's viability in the context of a campaign against Obama, let's not forget that a Huckabee nomination would neutralize Obama's only real vulnerability, namely Obama's relative inexperience in national politics. Finally, is it at all believable that Kristol wouldn't have heard about Huckabee's profound cluelessness on foreign policy — an issue which Kristol is known to care about somewhat, and which, in the very same column, he suggests would be a liability in an Obama candidacy? (Last we heard from Huckabee, he was pushing for a foreign policy triangulation between Tom Friedman and Frank Gaffney.)

Several weeks ago I noticed that before the rise of Huckabee, in the course of touting Joe Lieberman as a Republican vice-presidential candidate, Kristol promoted (among other possibilities) a Huckabee-Lieberman ticket. I couldn't believe then that this was anything other than a Straussian sop to the Christian right, just as I can't believe now that Kristol's Huckabee boosterism is sincere. I thus readily confess to having no bleeding idea what Kristol is trying to achieve with this column — and neither do you.

Bill Buckley might have been a fine New York Times columnist. Christopher Caldwell would be an excellent one. Pat Buchanan would at least pass Shafer's interesting, different, and better than Roger Cohen test. If the Times needed an insightful neocon, they could have called Eli Lake. As for Kristol, Matt Yglesias is right, somebody whose writing takes a decoder ring to decipher — even if the comprehensible bits weren't lazy and insensible — doesn't need to be wasting column inches anywhere, let alone a paper whose editors he feels should be prosecuted for committing journalism. Heckuva job, Pinchy.

Coda: Kristol also managed to misattribute a Michael Medved quote to Michelle Malkin. Now that's lazy.