Thomas Frank: Phony spin even Fox News won’t buy

For decades, the idiot pundit class has pushed Democrats to the right after every loss. It's not working this time

Thirty-four years ago, after a different disaster for Democrats, the pundit form known as the electoral postmortem reached an important milestone. It happened on the “MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” a then-influential PBS news program, on the day in 1980 following Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan. Morton Kondracke, on his way to becoming one of TV’s most respected bombastinators, was part of a panel sifting through the results. The traditional Democrat among the group was in despair; the Republican was jubilant. Then, like a ray of light through the darkness, came the words of the rising pundit princeling: “It seems to me,” Kondracke announced, “that what the Democratic Party has to do is adopt some sort of a — what might be called a neo-liberal ideology.”

The author from whom I derive this account of that shifting-of-the-tectonic-plates moment, Randall Rothenberg, proceeded to ennoble his description of the exchange with all the drama he could summon: He described Kondracke as a “youthful, guileless Midwesterner,” whose idea—“neoliberalism”—was so brash and shocking and just plumb outrageous that it actually startled the program’s host, Jim Lehrer (“What in the world is that, Mort?”). Indeed, the story of Kondracke’s TV pronouncement was supposed to be so momentous that it was the very first tale Rothenberg related in Chapter 1 of his 1984 salute to political pragmatism, “The Neoliberals.”