I found last month<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Times profile chose not to understand this and instead rode the “Greenwich millionaire” stereotype relentlessly. I\u2019d told one of its writers to call The New Yorker\u2019s Jane Mayer, who shared a Vermont farmhouse with Lamont decades ago as they and others worked on a weekly newspaper there. Mayer’s is the one admiring quote that’s not from a “country-club” friend of Lamont’s, but the reporters, apparently obsessed with how many cars he has owned, make clear that he was driving an Audi even in Vermont. Somehow they don’t discover that much more recently he taught poor, nonwhite kids in Bridgeport, for two years, although that may be corrected in a small item between now and Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Times\u2019 Lieberman profile is straight out of the playbook of his old advisor Carter Eskew, who\u2019s quoted twice. Lieberman’s rejection by Democrats has \u201cfreed him to do and say exactly what he felt,\u201d reporter Janny Scott tells us. But the question of what, exactly, Lieberman does feel is obliterated by quote after quote asserting that lockstep leftist Democrats have left him, because Joe thinks for himself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“‘He’s always done whatever he wants to do. Why would anyone expect him at this point to become a good soldier?'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“‘To his credit, he did run in the primary. And, to his credit, he didn’t trim his sails.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“‘The last thing I would have predicted was that, to me, this genuinely spiritual, genuinely likeable guy would arrive at a point at which so many of the leaders of his own party felt insulted by him.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“‘I think he came away with a resolve to answer to his country first and his party second.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are representative, from four different speakers. And the other view? Reporter Scott offers that herself, sort-of: “[Lieberman] has long chosen to describe himself as ‘independent-minded’ rather than moderate. That quality has surfaced at every stage of his political career, apparently the product of a combination of upbringing, intellectual orientation, religion, experience, perhaps expediency. Where admirers see a man of deep principles, detractors see an opportunist.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the supporting quote from someone to buttress that last assertion? There is none. Anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what does<\/em> Lieberman think when he’s doing all this independent thinking for himself? Not only are there no Schiavo or detainee positions here; there is no evidence Lieberman thinks of anyone besides himself. No reporter asks him how many Connecticut soldiers have died in Iraq, as a Times editor did ask Lamont over dinner. Caught by surprise, Lamont didn\u2019t know. Lieberman must, because a staffer sends out condolences and keeps a list; but would he really be able to answer, if asked on the spot? The Times doesn\u2019t tell, because it didn\u2019t ask.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat’s going on here? A “news side” rebellion against the editorial-page\u2019s Lamont endorsement? An effort to anticipate Lamont’s likely loss to Lieberman? Not at all. Harried reporters, trying to think big, are reminding us that their “first rough draft of history” tends to see breaking news through the rear-view mirror of premises they haven’t time to examine. They work under rushed conditions that prevent them from thinking beyond conventional story lines and cultural mindsets; rather, they have to play to them, collapse things into them, to write something equally rushed readers will understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Times journalists didn\u2019t sit in some room wondering, \u201cHow can we take down Lamont?\u201d If anything, it was \u201cWhat makes this guy tick?,\u201d and then they ran around trying to make a horse by committee, grasping at some concept \u2013 \u201cson of privilege\u201d; \u201chardened independent\u201d \u2013 that gestures at something in each candidate but buries much of what\u2019s true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Really these two profiles should be read in their entirety and taught in journalism schools for years to come. They probably won\u2019t be, not least because Lamont may lose, for reasons actually unappreciated in the profiles. For one, Lieberman, in public office since he was 28, feels to many Connecticut residents like an uncle or a comfortable old coat. \u201cI know Joe,\u201d they\u2019ll say, still touched that he patted them on the back once fifteen years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By comparison, Lamont was dry as a stick in debates, even if very decent and principled. He\u2019s been a jejune campaigner, than which there is no greater sin to a savvy reporter. He doesn\u2019t balance an instinct for the avuncular with an instinct for the jugular that would have shredded Lieberman\u2019s folksy charm by hammering on his positions. When Lieberman called last month for doubling the number of troops in Iraq, it seems not to have occurred to Lamont to demand to know if Lieberman was calling to reinstitute the draft, which Joe somehow avoided back in 1967, when he was of age and the Vietnam War was raging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLamont admits he wasn’t ready\u201d to mount that kind of attack. \u2018I watched [Lieberman] with Cheney,’ he says of the vice presidential debate six years ago. ‘It was all “My worthy adversary, my esteemed colleague.” It was right out of the House of Lords. Some people say I should have pushed back a little harder, but my nature is my nature.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAsked if maybe obnoxious just isn’t his style, he rolls his eyes a bit. He knows where nice guys finish, and it isn’t in the Senate. ‘Oh, I can see the headline now,’ he says. ‘Ned Lamont: Too Decent for Politics.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the preceding two paragraphs are from a Washington Post profile<\/a>, by David Segal in the paper\u2019s Style section, from back before Lamont won the Democratic primary. Maybe the Times will get there by November 8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jim Sleeper – November 4, 2006, 10:21PM By instinct and necessity, daily newspaper reporters are democratic, inquisitive, and therefore easy to talk to. But there is, as they say, another side of the story, and, wow, was it ever on display last week in two big New York Times profiles of Ned Lamont and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2940"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3365,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions\/3365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}