Repartay

Joe Klein laments the quality of questions at Barack Obama’s presser today:

Watching the Obama rollout of his national security team from overseas–I’m in Europe, on my way to Afghanistan–I was struck by the inanity of most of the questions from my colleagues. Granted, these are political reporters, not national security or foreign policy specialists, but what sort of journalist expects the President-elect to tell the “inside story” of how he selected Hillary Clinton?

Which sort of begs the question: why are there political reporters in the first place? It seems to me that what most people hate about politics are wildly amplified by “political” reporting.

I know that might sound a bit hypocritical coming from me, but in my own defense, I try and focus a lot on government and policy, to which politics are a white trash cousin that crashes every family gathering. For example, in a world without a “politics” beat, Sarah Palin would have had to spend most of her time dealing with reporters who understood something of policy, and who would have been better positioned to (sooner) expose her candidacy as the sham it was. In reality though, there’s an entire segment of the press corps monomaniacally focused on the aesthetics of government, which grossly magnifies the importance of things that are mostly irrelevant to good governance.

Practically speaking, there’s simply no divorcing politics and government, but a disproportional emphasis on pure politics distorts policy choices, creates suboptimal outcomes, and results in the continued employment of Chris Matthews and worse, Maureen Dowd, whose writing would be more appropriate in US Weekly than the New York Times.