Spectator Sports

Here's a news flash: political consultants, much like the people they represent and work for, are more often than not unprincipled mercenaries. I know, I know, it's a shock. But hilarious all the same in its collegial garment-rending.

“The risk for someone like Howard is that he is surrendering his credibility,” said Joel Benenson, a senior political adviser to President Obama who was Mr. Weiner’s campaign pollster. “He made countless statements to the press during the presidential primaries that were wrong, and now he’s saying things that completely contradict what he said four years ago.”

As opposed to, say, Obama himself, who made a good many statements and promises during his campaign that he now suddenly not in any rush to fulfill, perhaps because it might piss off the Goldman Sachs thugs Obama decided to surround himself with. [Link via Global Guerrillas.]

But really, this notion of "credibility" Benenson plaintively evokes, whence does it originate, and to whom does it redound? Surely no sentient being, whether or not they work in the political snakepit, can take (or even say) this with a straight face. It's been said a million times, and remains ineluctably true -- the only thing that hurts the careers of politicians and their hangers-on is getting caught with either a dead girl or a live boy. Pretty much everything else is negotiable.

Joel Benenson knows that, and he knows that Jim Rutenberg and Raymond Hernandez know that, who in turn know that you and I intuitively know all the metaconnective properties of those epistemological extensions, and so on. Even people who have no clue who or what Howard Wolfson is get that; indeed, it's as likely to be their rationale for tuning out of the political as stone ignorance might be. Who could blame them?

It's an incestuous little crowd of people, discernible only by their lack of belief in anything substantial, who make careers out of appearing on each other's shows, peddling conjecture as analysis and demagoguery as policy. After a while they become indistinguishable, leaving us only to mark time as to when, say, Wolfson would jump from Hillary Clinton's campaign to Faux News, or John McCain will be appearing on Press the Meat yet again. (Answer: Tomorrow, of course. It's Sunday!)

So a rented smear artist has lent his talents to the pint-size would-be potentate-for-life (who just happens to be a billionaire financier) of America's largest city-state. He'd probably work for Sarah Palin's 2012 presidential campaign if the money was there, as would Joel Benenson or any of them. The idea that political advisers -- whose sole purpose is to take a lump of steaming horseshit and either mold it into a favorable impression or chuck it at the nearest opponent -- might be grievously wounded by one of their own creating a bad impression is pretty funny.

Not quite as funny as, say, every one of them -- consultants and media weasels alike -- suddenly having to find an honest day's work, and not nearly as funny as Bobo Brooks letting himself get felt up by a resolutely heterosexual Republican senator, but we have to take our chuckles where we can find them.