Far be it from a highly opinionated blogger to cast aspersions on punditry, but… I’m going to cast aspersions on punditry.

Having spent time in the self-satisfied fields of political media, I was reminded how much I don’t miss it by yesterday’s Mark Halperin episode, in which the Time columnist and MSNBC commentator smugly called President Obama “a dick” on the punditry show, Morning Joe.

Halperin quickly apologized, saying that he thought the remark would be bleeped out, but MSNBC suspended him for a while.

Bleh.

I’m influenced by my old boss, John Kennedy—sorry for the name drop, but it’s relevant here, I really did come to feel differently on this point after working with John—who firmly believed that, no matter how much you disagreed with a president, having the most powerful job in the world is brutally hard and the people who volunteer for it deserve our respect. Or at the very least, our civility.

If Mark Halperin dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, 50,000 people could fill his professional shoes. Not so President Obama. But punditry is the great equalizer, a self-contained world in which participants have the right to slag off the president because their chatter is nothing but a sport, a game. They are the media’s equivalent of soccer’s hooligans. And while I think the freedom to criticize the president is one of democracy’s great and essential virtues, still, I wish they’d aim a little higher than hitting below the belt.

Which actually brings me to the thought that got me writing this post, something Paul Krugman wrote on his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal.”

In describing a latecomer to the idea that the original stimulus package was too small, Krugman writes,

This is actually a fairly familiar thing from my years as a pundit: the surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon. To be considered credible on politics you have to have considered Bush a great leader, and not realized until Katrina that he was a disaster; to be considered credible on national security you have to have supported the Iraq War, and not realized until 2005 that it was a terrible mistake; to be credible on economics you have to have regarded Greenspan as a great mind, and not become disillusioned until 2007 or maybe 2008.

This is classic Krugman: Implicitly self-congratulatory and irritatingly self-satisfied. But at the same time, he’s exactly right. People who are too far out there too early in staking out a position generally get ignored when their position turns out to be right.
But the people who were wrong and then convert—the plaudits they receive!

Why this phenomenon happens…I wish I knew.