Gergen learns: Taibbi's no door Matt

A few weeks back I wrote about a funny exchange between Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and David Gergen of CNN in which Taibbi's bomb-throwing, F-bombing style clashed with the ever-staid, ever-upstanding Gergen.   The CNN pundit was opining about the business community's unhappiness with Obama, despite the record profits and massive bonuses accrued on his watch. Taibbi couldn't take it any longer, blurting out,  "Fuck the business community!" Gergen, dumbfounded, echoed his words in a way suggesting heresy: "Fuck the business community? That's what you said?"

But that wasn't even the weirdest part.   Gergen seemed surprised byTaibbi's rough edges and made a few remarks to that effect that never made it into the magazine. Taibbi didn't know what to make of it, and then it came to him --  Gergen, it seems, had gone through the entire interview thinking he was talking to Matt Bai of the New York Times.    That explained it: Matt Bai -- who, like Gergen, preaches the gospel of bipartisanship -- is the last person Gergen would have expected to use such incendiary language. You don't climb the D.C. journalistic ladder pissing off others on the way up. And, if there's anything you never say, it's "Fuck the business community." You gotta fluff those feathers, not ruffle them.

Taibbi sees Bai as a prototype: the liberal journalist who turns on his own as he learns to go along to get along in Washington.

Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.

 

Bai is the poster child of those guys. So naturally Gergen must have been shocked to see, well, Matt Bai screaming kill-the-rich brickbats at him over coffee and pastries. I had a good laugh imagining that somewhere, at that very moment, David Gergen was telling someone what an asshole Matt Bai is. I wonder if anyone's filled him in on the mistake yet.

 Michael Kinsley, Dana Milbank, and Jake Tapper are a few others in that long line.  Soon joining their ranks? Villager and Obama apologist Ezra Klein. Yes, he's now defending Obama's tax cut capitulation. But, then, you knew that.