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  "path": "/this-election-is-too-darn-important-to-be-left-to-merciful-salad-eaters",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-31T13:17:08.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "Journalismism",
    "Media Meltdowns",
    "Politics",
    "2028 election",
    "adam wren",
    "donald trump",
    "politico",
    "rahm emanuel",
    "tote that water",
    "Overton Window"
  ],
  "textContent": "Among a certain class of politics reporters and pundits, the single most legitimizing thing a Democratic politician can be is \"loathed by everyone younger than, browner than, or to the ideological left of James Carville.\" Safer by far than engaging with a politician's policies, ideology, or track record is to simply take an index of how liberal and progressive types feel about him. Do they hate his guts? Then he is serious. Look out, bleeding hearts and socialist teens! This guy does not have time for any namby-pamby \"believing in stuff\" crap; he recognizes The Stakes. He gets that some things are just too important to approach in principled or intellectually serious ways.\n\nThis reflects at least two tidal forces in America's legacy politics press. One is that it is largely peopled by weenie meritocrat twerps whose families have done quite well in the system as it exists; they would never dream of anything as gauche or tacky as being Republicans, but they also do not want the alternative to entail any commitment to actually changing the basic arrangement of power and privilege in American society. Better to set the leftmost edge of the Overton Window at \"means-tested private-school tuition-refund vouchers for the minor children of any U.S. citizen who starts a woman- or minority-owned small business and runs it for at least 18 months in a neighborhood with population density higher than that of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and with a median per-capita household income less than 66.6 percent of that of the wealthiest census tract within 12.5 miles, provided the children commit to founding a woman- or minority-owned company within 18 months of college graduation,\" and then police that boundary vigorously.\n\nThe other deranging impulse, closely related, is the legacy press's addiction to horserace-style political analysis. The Detested Center-Right Ghoul is both a fellow adherent to and the physical embodiment of the idea that all that matters in an election is detecting which candidate _everybody else_ —imagined uniformly as rubes and ignoramuses with doctrinaire Reaganite values, a wary and incoherent pink mass oscillating at all times between credulity and cynicism—will fall for, and then scolding anybody who attempts to complicate that candidate's path to victory by starting a conversation about what they'd like government to actually _do_ beyond rewarding election winners with jobs. You can cover Gavin Newsom, for example, without the tricky business of interrogating beliefs and policy ideas: He has none, and regards the entire concept of having any as self-evidently foolish.",
  "title": "This Election Is Too Darn Important To Be Left To Merciful Salad Eaters"
}