Well, I would if I had like an infinity calculator, but I don’t so I’ll just have to guess. The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison justly pummels them for at least a dozen good reasons, including their ridiculous, though “typical”, exaggeration of instability in the Middle East, “with a nuclear arms race looking more when than if”! Look out, folks, she’s gonna blow!
Over at New York magazine, Adam K. Raymond explains how “the Times turned a serious process into a silly reality TV show,” not really the best way, Raymond remarks, to defeat a reality TV president. At the New Republic, Alex Shephard also remarked on the absurd reality show trappings of the affair, adding that the Times topped the whole thing off in the worst possible way: “On Sunday, the editorial page undermined the whole charade—and, really, the whole point of an endorsement—by choosing two, diametrically opposed candidates: [Elizabeth] Warren and [Amy] Klobuchar.”
Ashley Steinberg, filing for Slate, may have gotten in the winning stinger: “The indecisiveness might have felt less grating if the Times hadn’t put so much effort into turning the endorsement into a spectacle in its own right. The promised inside look at how the Times made one of its most ostensibly important decisions of the year turned out to mean viewers spent an hour watching the paper crumble under the weight of its own self-importance.”
Still, I find I have to disagree with Ashley on this one, just a little: I think the indecisiveness would have felt just as grating, no matter how the Times might have handled it.
Afterwords
I think either Warren or Bernie Sanders would likely be disastrous candidates (Klobuchar I’m not so sure of), and disastrous presidents as well, though not quite so disastrous as a second term of Trump. Neither, of course, have Trump’s disgusting corruption, racism, and overall brutality, but both would be stunningly incompetent. Sanders would probably spend much of his time seeking to build a popular “revolution” for ideas that appeal to a good 15% of the electorate and getting madder and madder when people wouldn’t listen. Warren would surely try to rule via executive order, since she couldn’t get anything through Congress, leading to endless lawsuits and giving a largely conservative federal judiciary every opportunity to wreck her presidency, something they would surely proceed to do without suffering the least twinge of conscience. She asked for it, goddamnit, and we’re going to give it to her!
