Projection

Tom Hilton looks into Melinda Henneberger and discovers that her random anecdotes just happened to line up with her strong pro-forced-pregnancy views! (“‘…choice,’ make no mistake, is killing the Democratic Party.” It’s scary to think about how much views that aren’t the majority position are hurting them…) What are the odds? And not only that, but she also lined up with the far right on the Schaivo case, complete with appalling, gratuitous slaps at her husband. Another question: it would obviously be too much to ask for her to write about how the disgraceful (and enormously unpopular) Schiavo circus hurt the GOP, but has she ever written an op-ed about how the death penalty is “killing the Republican Party” by costing them the Catholic vote? I know which way I’m betting.

Anyway, as Digby says there’s no genre of op-ed more annoying than this kind of Friedman/Broder special, where well-rewarded pundits tour Real America and find — amazingly enough! — that Real Americans just happen to agree entirely with their a priori views:

That is exactly why I don’t trust this stale and silly convention of DC insiders and elite pundits making anthropological forays into Real America and “reporting” back on the thinking of the electorate. They just reinforce their own preconceived notions and come back to their perch at the top of the political power structure secure in the knowledge that they are just like small town, hard working, regular folks after all.

Give me cold poll numbers any day — and if somebody wants to follow up with interviews of a sample of that sample for an article in the paper, then fine. But the notion that DC pundits have some special way of talking to strangers that translates into something meaningful about the population at large is ridiculous.

Henenberger is anti-choice. Fine. She went out and found some anti-choice people just like her and extrapolated from their conversation that abortion was killing the Democratic party, just as she personally thinks it is. But she never says that. Instead, she pretends that she has conducted some objective reporting which led to the inevitable conclusion that the Democratic party is losing because of abortion. That is shoddy journalism, opinion or not.

And the real brickbats here, of course, belong to the New York Times for not even requiring her to directly acknowledge that her cherry-picked Stories From the Heartland happen to accord with her own views on the subject.