Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Biden is in. Critics are keeping quiet(er)

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

David Kurtz/Talking Points Memo:

‘Do Something’ Is Not A Plan Or Wise Counsel Or A Way Out

INSIDE: An Anthropology Of The 'Do-Something’ Caucus

Fast forward to the political crisis that President Biden is facing today. Unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, you can properly lay the debate disaster and his failure to reckon with his own aging it at his feet and his alone. But the feeding frenzy that has ensued, the type of coverage that we’ve been bombarded with for the last 12 days, and the expectation that this drumbeat demanding that he and/or the Democratic Party “do something!” is a choice, a whole series of choices in fact, rooted in a particular kind of news judgment. That news judgment is itself a product of a certain way of seeing politics and political journalism. A prism with some utility sometimes. But it also has its own distortions and limitations.

The greatest of these limitations is that much of political journalism is divorced from policy and the substance of politics. It’s the horserace coverage, the who’s up and who’s down, the who’s in and who’s out. And no matter how complex the topic, or carefully balanced the various competing public interests are on a given issue, or how long the history of tackling the issue in a substantive way, once it enters the realm of political journalism it goes through a reductive process that distills it to whether it’s good or bad politically. Does it help or does it hurt? And if it hurts, what are you going to do about it?