Excerpted from So You Want to Be President?

The Punditocracy. No, it’s not the latest cool-kid band out of Brooklyn; it’s the name for the collection of talking heads (again, not the band) that clutter our various media outlets. They frequently come in the form of newspaper or magazine opinion columnists (George Will, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Joe Klein) who spend their Sundays not in church, but sitting around a table with Tim Russert or George Stephanopoulos.

We also have the political “media personalities.” Media personalities tend to be hosts of their own often eponymous television shows. They and the pundits are close cousins, species with many similarities but several key differences — kind of like chimpanzees and orangutans, or Hanson and the Osmonds.

Pundits like to consider themselves “analysts,” forming their learned opinions free of ideological bias through a careful study of the candidates, the issues and the populace, but the true source of pundit opinion is a word that rhymes with, “smashpole.”

Like pundits, media personalities analyze the news and deliver opinions, but instead of presenting an “unbiased”¹ opinion, they rely on a very specific ideological filter that tends to, shall we say, color their versions of events.

The most obvious indication that you’re in the presence of a pundit is when, with the utmost confidence and clarity, he or she predicts something that is almost certainly wrong.

One example of a pundit is Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times. At one point he was an incisive commentator on Middle East politics, until an unfortunate accident plunged him into a kind of reverse-Memento situation in which he can predict only six months into the future.² Here are actual statements Friedman made between 2003 and 2006 on the topic of the Iraq war (emphasis mine).

“The next six months in Iraq — which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there — are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.”
(In a New York Times column, 11/30/03)

“What I absolutely don’t understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi caretaker government made up of — I know a lot of these guys — reasonably decent people and more-than-reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it’s over. I don’t get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush? Can we let this play out, please?”
(On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” 6/3/04)

“What we’re gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months, is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.”
(On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” 10/3/04)

“I think we’re in the end game now. ... I think we’re in a six-month window here where it’s going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt, I think, the next congressional election — that’s my own feeling — let alone the presidential one.”
(On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” 9/25/05)

“I think that we’re going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding — in which case I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out — or whether it really is a fool’s errand.”
(On “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” 1/23/06)

“Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months — probably sooner — whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.”
(On MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews,” 5/11/06)

How can someone who has so often been so wrong continue to be given column inches in the most influential paper in the country? Who cares? What’s important is that, despite the average pundit being about as accurate at predicting the future as a Ouija board at a 10-year-old girl’s slumber party, the punditocracy often drives the public debate on a candidate.

In many cases, pundits’ misguided analyses even become conventional wisdom. How else would we know that Al Gore is dull, Ronald Reagan was sleepy, and Hillary Clinton wants to turn the country into a feminist commie paradise where all men sacrifice their testicles at the altar of Athena when they turn eighteen?

I know, it makes my head hurt too, which is why I’m writing a book about how to run for president, rather than running for president.³

The easiest way for you to tell that you’re in the presence of a “media personality” is by the really crazy shit that is spewing out of his or her mouth. For this chapter’s exercise, your challenge is to identify some media personalities by correctly guessing which personality is spewing which brand of crazy shit.

We’re going to borrow our format from the classic game show “Name That Tune.” For each personality, I will give you five different phrases that represent his or her particular brand of opinion-making. After reading each phrase, try to guess who the media personality might be. After the list of phrases, I will provide the correct answer.⁴ If you were able to guess the personality correctly after just one clue, give yourself 5 electoral votes. If it took two clues, you earn 4 electoral votes, and so on down to 0 electoral votes if you are unable to successfully identify the personality even after all the help I’ve given you, which is pretty ungrateful if you ask me.

MYSTERY PERSONALITY NO. 1

1. “God gave us the Earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”
Your guess: _____________________

2. “I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy-cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.”
Your guess: _____________________

3. “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. ... These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. ... I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
Your guess: _____________________

4. “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
Your guess: _____________________

5. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Name that personality: _____________________

Correct answer: Ann Coulter. Okay, that was an easy one — the nuttiest of the nutty, the sluttiest of the slutty, the least deserving of continuing to draw breath of those who continue to draw breath.

MYSTERY PERSONALITY NO. 2

1. “That’s my advice to all homosexuals, whether they’re in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don’t tell anybody what you do; your life will be a lot easier.”
Your guess: _____________________

2. “Shut up!” . . . “Pinhead!”
Your guess: _____________________

3. “You must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9/11, is a traitor. Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.”
Your guess: _____________________

4. “I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration.”
Your guess: _____________________

5. “Yeah, I’m obnoxious, yeah, I cut people off, yeah, I’m rude. You know why? Because you’re busy.”
Name that personality: _____________________

Correct answer: Bill O’Reilly. Also pretty easy, since there’s only one man who holds equal hatred for homosexuals, Democrats and people who say “Happy holidays.”

MYSTERY PERSONALITY NO. 3

1. “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”
Your guess: _____________________

2. “When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation.”
Your guess: _____________________

3. “I’m doing what I was born to do. That’s host. You’re doing what you were born to do. That’s listen. Together, we make a heck of a team.”
Your guess: _____________________

4. “Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”
Your guess: _____________________

5. “I am addicted to prescription pain medication.”
Name that personality: _____________________

Correct answer: Rush Limbaugh. Duh.

MYSTERY PERSONALITY NO. 4

1. “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.”
Your guess: _____________________

2. “Is it [that] you hate this president or that you hate America?”
Your guess: _____________________

3. “[Democrats should] stay home on Election Day . . . for the sake of the nation.”
Your guess: _____________________

4. “It doesn’t say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.”
Your guess: _____________________

5. “Can we pray for the re-election of George Bush?”
Name that personality: _____________________

Correct answer: Sean Hannity. That one was tougher. Think of Sean Hannity as Rush Limbaugh without the drug habit.

MYSTERY PERSONALITY NO. 5

1. “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”
Your guess: _____________________

2. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
Your guess: _____________________

3. “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”
Your guess: _____________________

4. “Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.”
Your guess: _____________________

5. “Good night, and good luck.”
Name that personality: _____________________

Correct answer: David Strathairn playing the fictional character Edward R. Murrow. I understand there’s some confusion over this point; some people mistakenly believe George Clooney’s award-winning film “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a biographical film of a real person. But just look at those quotes: “not confuse dissent with disloyalty”? Credibility built on truth, of all things? If that’s not fantasy, I don’t know what the word means.

____________________
¹Quotation marks included to connote irony. The idea that the average pundit is “unbiased” is about as believable as a multibillionaire Jewish businessman-turned-politician running for president as an Independent with a hope of winning. (Note: If by the time this book reaches your hands there is indeed a President Bloomberg, this joke isn’t going to work as well as I expected.)
²I’m only speculating that Thomas Friedman suffered some sort of head trauma, but I can’t come up with a better explanation.
³Well, because of that and the fact that as soon as some reporter asked me if I’ve ever inhaled, I’d have to say, “Do you want the list alphabetically or chronologically?” (Note to Mom: Just kidding.)
⁴Probably.