Dana Milbank needs to find another job.
The one he has -- covering politics for The Washington Post -- seems to bore him to tears. He was up in New Hampshire to cover the Republican primary and couldn't find anything productive to do other than turn expense forms in to his employer.
This year turned out to be a particularly wasteful one in the Granite State. Once Romney won in Iowa, the question was not whether he would win here but by how much. Yet the reporters descended anyway: Our hotel rooms were nonrefundable.
So, what was he doing in New Hampshire? Had he been forced there at gunpoint?
Apparently, he was just running with the herd. And it was quite a herd.
The good residents of New Hampshire, uninspired by the candidates, seemed less interested in attending candidate rallies than in years past. The result was that traveling mobs of journalists routinely outnumbered the “real people.”
This year, however, Milbank had the honor of showing one of his editors around the state.
As I played sherpa for my editor, it was hard to conceal the fact that I was leading her on a journalistic road to nowhere. Among our first stops was the debate in Manchester, where one of the most embarrassing truths of campaign coverage was revealed: Reporters who attend debates aren’t even in the same room with the candidates. We take our seats in a gymnasium, plug in our laptops — and then watch on TV, like everybody else does at home.
While my editor watched on the screen in front of us, I attempted to look busy by sending out tweets: “Gingrich has now officially surpassed Churchill in jowls . . . Uh-oh. Sounds as if Perry is back on NyQuil.”
It would seem that is what now passes for the watchdog function of the press. Instead of policy analysis, instead of going out and finding the "real people" rather than waiting for them to come to him at some phony event, Milbank dishes out snark about NyQuil. A ninth-grader could do that -- and for a lot less money than Milbank is likely making.
Milbank decries the whole thing as a big fraud and he is correct. But that doesn't stop him from jumping right in and wallowing in it.
And it won't stop him from covering the traveling fraud show as it moves from state to state and cynically writing after the fact about how awful it is as if he was somehow above it all.
If it's that bad, Dana, let someone else do it and go find a real job.