Today, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich penned a quite harsh treatment of Wittman's political profile and work career on the occasion of Senator Joseph Lieberman hiring "the bull moose" to be his new communications director.
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Wittman appears to be politically amoral, but that might not be fair. I've met him numerous times and have marveled at his ability to see the nugget of a political idea that escaped everyone else and then market that dark horse notion into dominating mainstream political discourse.
Is that supposed to be a good thing, in and of itself, the ability to take something that no one gave two shits about -- because, one assumes, that its practical import was essentially nil -- and make people care? I thought I had the market on bloodless cynicism cornered -- twenty years ago, I told my college marketing professor that I felt that a marketer's job was convincing people to buy crap they don't really want with money they don't really have -- but Wittmann's got me smoked. After all, he honed his "dark horse" chops working for the Christian Coalition, perhaps the singularly most unproductive yet destructive force in modern American politics. He worked for Ralph Reed. He knew how big the Abramoff scandal was going to be months before it broke, because he personally knew most of the players.
It should not be misunderestimated what a pernicious influence the work of people like Wittmann has wrought on this country. It allowed people who had rightly been marginalized -- abortion extremists, gay marriage wackos, intelligent design yahoos, and the like -- not only to be taken seriously, but to actually seize control of the terms of debate. It paved the way for talk radio goons like Limbaugh and Hannity, wingut welfare bumwipe peddlers like Coulter. It distilled real concerns of real people into sound-bark yapping points for the usual single-issue putzes to repeat until enough people thought those things were true. It made "red meat" into not only the dominant, but practically the only available group on the political food pyramid.
It's an "ability", true enough, but it's not an admirable one. That I even need to say that is a fair indication of what it's sunk to.
What those heaping scorn on Wittman are missing, however, is what his employment by Lieberman really means.
When political giants tie up, it's not an accident.
Lieberman's acquisition of Marshall Wittman, who is very close to John McCain, signals a calculation by some that McCain and Lieberman might tie up for the 2008 Presidential run. The progressive left will start choking at this point, coughing and convulsing uncontrollably -- but reason needs to be gripped for a moment.
McCain and Lieberman would be a formidable challenge for any Democratic opponent because even though both are now self-described neoconservatives and strongly supported America's botched war against Iraq, to many pundits they would "seem like" the very epitome of centrism.
Well, that's much more of an evaluation on the cognitive skills and intellectual honesty of the anointed commentariat than anything. They all seem to have daddy issues -- the female ones need affirmation, the males need to prove they're just as tough as Big Russ or Big Tweety was -- and it gets in the way of the practicalities of what they espouse.
Or maybe it's because the pundits are now at all the same parties with the people they're supposed to objectively cover. Or hell, maybe it really is just Stockholm Syndrome. It doesn't matter anymore.
What matters is that Wittmann should now be divorced from even the semblance of credibility. He's been pimping McCain and Lieberman for a couple years, even in the face of facts and logic, never revealing his agenda. Unless we're supposed to believe that Holy Joe was just looking for his biggest net-booster, whoever it might turn out to be, to come work for him. Perhaps a blogger ethics panel can be convened to get to the bottom of all this.
In the meantime, I would just like to go on the record as saying that if there are any remaining high-dollar communications director jobs in the offing, I think Senator [Governor; Congressperson] Fill-in-the-blank is doing just a spectacular job, and I hope he/she will run in '08, in order to re-invigorate the true core party principles of catering to [either "Hank Hill Democrats" or "McCainiac Brainiacs", whichever turns out to be more viable and profitable]. Because while values are important, value -- in the sense of getting the most for your campaign dollar -- is all.
If Wittmann was a NASCAR driver, he'd be the one driving the Preparation H car. Taibbi still has the all-time best takedown of this clown.
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