I have to say, I'm a bit disillusioned. I've been following Matt Bai's writing career ever since he started with the New York Times magazine several years ago. I'm disappointed with the latest turn his career has taken: the publication of his most recent book, The Argument. If you don't want to give Bai royalties--and I suggest that you probably don't--start by reading the reviews of his book by Kakutani:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
and Gillespie:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Who is Matt Bai, really? You can read about his
credentials here, and find out that he's a journalist with lots of training and experience, but with a long-term axe to grind against the blogosphere. Like many journalists, he resents the access to the new media by people without his level of professional training.
In his recent book about the foibles of the Democrats, he claims that the Democratic party has no new ideas, that bloggers have no interest in history (that they have something like an anti-interest), and that they spend their days practicing groupthink and shouting down anyone with positive policy plans.
I have to ask myself, on the basis of those arguments: how much time does he actually spend here? Because I spend relatively little time here, and I've seen all kinds of great policy ideas mooted about: about universal healthcare (nyceve); about alternative energy (Jerome a Paris); about educational reform (teacherken), about the environment (orangeclouds). And these are just to name a very few things.
Bai claims that Markos is an intellectual lightweight, a claim that missing the main point of what we're even doing here. People are not specifically looking to Kos for policy prescriptions; we're indebted to him for setting up the site, supporting the participatory discussion model of online politics, and making this community possible. Bai seems to have some kind of North Korean, "dear leader" model of Daily Kos--and that just isn't how it works.
Matt's larger project is to discredit the Democratic party, with claims that the Democrats are just like the Republicans: that both parties long ago departed from the ideologies that defined them and have never been able to redefine their core values in a satifying way. There's a wonderful critique of Matt's larger muddled thinking here:
http://moonoverpittsburgh.blogspot.c...
The funny thing about Matt Bai is that he and former White House Faith-Based initiative deputy director David Kuo are both members of the Tufts class of 1990- and they are two sides of the same cynical political coin. Where did the professors go wrong? Just as Kuo attempted to grab the spotlight/TV time/15 minutes of fame by professing his "surprise" at the failure of compassionate conservatism within the Bush administration, so Bai is trying to sell books while simultaneously undermining the Democratic party. Neither one of them appeared to have any substantive knowledge of history or of ethics.
Let's not patronize the media whores, shall we?