“How do you write women so well?” the overeager receptionist asks Jack Nicholson’s character, a famed author with a compassion deficit, in the 1997 movie As Good as it Gets.
“I think of a man,” Nicholson’s character responds, “and I take away reason and accountability.”
That’s more a typecast of a political pundit: Think of a reporter and take away facts and accountability.
Pundits — and part of my job is punditry — are notoriously unaccountable. We pontificate and prognosticate, and when everything goes differently than we led our readers to expect, we just move on.
Every year since 2010 I have done my own small part to remedy this by writing an article about where I went most wrong. In this presidential primary year, my read of the GOP field is probably the most important.
But let me begin with a distinction, and a little bit of defensiveness. Making an incorrect prediction isn’t always making a mistake. If a shooting guard misses an open three pointer from straight-away it doesn’t mean he should have passed. The world is unpredictable, and the best we can do is play the odds.
On the other hand, sometimes we misread the political landscape because we fail to see something that we should have seen. I have never described Jeb Bush as the most likely candidate to win the GOP nomination, in part because he seems to lack political judgment and the right type of charisma. So even when he led in the polls, I saw him as, at best, a backup choice for GOP voters.
But early on, I thought Scott Walker was the most likely GOP nominee. I wrote that in May and in August. In those months (mostly in private), I also described Walker as my own preference, by default. His virtue, in my eyes: He had gone to war with the special interests (the government employee unions) and won. Any conservative in the Tea Party era will need to see the special interests as a rival — he will need to tell all subsidy-sucklers and K Streeters to beat it.
I thought Scott Walker was that guy. I was wrong, and I should have known better. Walker quickly proved me wrong: He bowed to the corn cronies in Iowa, sweet-talking the ethanol mandate, and he gave the Milwaukee Bucks a quarter-billion-dollar subsidy. This was predictable, and I should have seen it.
When Walker battled the special interests in Wisconsin — at the risk of his job and all of his political capital — he was fighting “the other guys.” There was little to no record of Walker opposing “our guys,” such as the corporate subsidy-sucklers. When I asked Walker, in a cow barn in Van Dyne Wisconsin in 2014, about the Export-Import Bank, he dodged. He also dodged when others asked him.
The tell was visible back in 2011 in Madison during his fight against the government-employee unions. When Walker stripped collective-bargaining power from those unions, he exempted the police and the firefighters. A profile in courage it was not.
Walker, in 2015, fell because his core virtue — fighting and beating the special interests — was a bit of a farce. I was fooled by that farce.
Also, as far as the 2016 field, I underestimated Ted Cruz. By the time I returned from Iowa this month, I saw him as the Iowa front-runner. I should have seen it earlier. His early debate performance underwhelmed me, and I think I was too impressed by Marco Rubio’s stage presence, Walker’s Walkerness, and Jeb Bush’s money pile.
Cruz, in four years in the Senate, waged war on the Washington establishment more ferociously, and maybe more calculatingly, than anyone before. It should have been obvious earlier that his appeal would be strong, and that his campaign in a caucus state would be strong.
On Donald Trump, I’m okay so far. I was caught off-guard by his surge, and I didn’t expect it to last this long, but I wisely avoided predicting a date by which he would fall.
My saddest failure in prognostication this year was predicting, on the McLaughlin Group, that the Mets would win the World Series in five games. Well, at least I was correct about the five-games part.
With the Mets’ pitching staff mostly returning, and the core of our batting order, we can always believe in next year. As as a political columnist, reporter, and pundit, 2016 holds out hope as well.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
