Sometimes you get the greatest insight into folks when they think the pressure is off.
What follows has exactly no political import, and, truly, says nothing about the writer in question’s journalistic chops or beat-acumen…at least not directly.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, given my Bayesian prior holding that anything that comes out of Chuck Todd’s mouth or pen is surpassingly likely to be…well…crap, I find his gig over at Peter King’s joint as a summer replacement for the Monday Morning Quarterback column to be a thing of perverse beauty. More, if you take Todd as the type specimen of a Village idiot, then you can read in his attempt to display both football cred. and knowledge a free-of-partisan-blinkers way to assess his actual skills, quality, and personality.
It ain’t pretty.
I’m not going to bother with an extended fisking — after all, it’s both Todd and a game — but a couple of things stand out.
First, it’s always about Todd. Taking Todd as an archetype of Village perspective, I’m suggesting this confirms the many hints that much of what drives elite DC media is how whatever is being covered fits in with and or confirms a collective world view and sense of status.
Which is what makes a simple word count so telling. Todd’ s column is just over 3,500 words long. 1,400 of those words — crucially the first words in the piece — dive deep into his claim to be a Green Bay Packers fan.
A couple of things on that. First, obviously, the man can root for whoever he wants. But that’s kind of the problem: there’s nothing inherently interesting about anyone’s choice sports-laundry connection. To go on for 1400 words — nearly twice as long as a conventional newspaper column, well into short feature length already — implies that the writer has something more to say than “I was born in the midwest and my dad liked the Packers.” Not our Todd.
No, what was really going on here, was a defensive crouch: Todd has never been to Lambeau, feels this is a s problem to be explained, and goes on at great length to tell his readers that he really is an authentic football fan and a man of the Green Bay people. Alas, the man has a tin ear. Check this out:
The most die-hard Packers fans believe you can’t claim fanatic status unless you’ve been to the holiest of football sights [sic–does SI no longer employ copy-editors?] (sorry, Canton). Honestly, I don’t blame them. If I were in their shoes, I might use that piece of information to lodge my own skeptical inquiry. But I swear, my Packers allegiance is real.
Don’t believe me? Just ask my good friend, Steve Hayes, the editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard and a frequent FOX News analyst. Steve is also a part of the D.C. Packers mafia; of course, he came about his love for the Green and Gold the normal way—he was born and raised in the Land of Cheeseheads. I first met Steve, in 2000, when he was applying for a job at a publication I was running called, The Hotline. I noticed his Wisconsin roots on his résumé and, naturally, asked him if he was a Packers fan. He said he was, but I wanted to know if he was truly a diehard. I have a standard question for anyone around my age who claims to be a Packers fan: Who was Green Bay’s starting quarterback before Lynn Dickey? Well, Steve not only answered correctly, he noted that David Whitehurst also punted for the team. Steve got the job offer and he accepted. So thank you, David Whitehurst, for being just obscure enough to help me prove true Packer fandom and, more importantly, thanks for being the link to one of my better friendships in D.C.
Arrrgh! Village idiocy in one verbose package. I’ll leave it to my fellow jackals to draw out every tin-eared wrong note there, and just point out that the whole thing is steeped in unctuous self-congratulation: Todd’s the boss; he’s steeped in the kind of minutiae that helps folks pretend they actually know a subject such facts don’t illuminate (sound familiar in the context of elite political “journalism”?); and hiring is a boys-club adventure.
Most of all though, as I read through this endless preamble, I kept asking myself why Todd thinks I care? Peter King rubs some football fans the wrong way, I know — he is clearly one of the NFL’s inner circle reporters, and can be seen as an insufficiently critical booster of the Borg that is Roger Goodell’s plantation, but there’s no doubt he’s done the work and made the calls and knows the game and its people very well. You can read his weekly column and get a lot of content.
Here, by the time you get to spitting distance of the half way mark, you know only that Chuck Todd is aware that he doesn’t have a lot of credibility to spare in this beat, and he protests — waaaaaay too much — that seeing him as a dilettante out of his depth is unfair. “I do so love football! I know the names of some now obscure players! I’m rich/influential enough to go to football games w. famous people in various cities! ‘The journalist in me’ [his words] is good enough to make me check a box score!” It’s a plea both pathetic and, to me, confirming of my prior beliefs about Chuck: he’s a poseur and a light weight.
I’m just having some fun here over my second coffee of a weekend morning, so I won’t go on much longer. (You’ve heard that before.) Just one more thought. That embarrassingly long and weak lede is a tell to Todd’s personality: he knows he’s out of his depth as a football columnist, and tries to hard to persuade himself as much as his readers that this is not so; how that might dovetail with his political commentary is, again, an exercise for the reader.
What follows, though, is more directly damning to Todd’s reputation as an analyst of just about anything. He doesn’t do the work. He goes as far as a first impression and stops. From the very start of the “substantive” part of the piece:
1) I think the best teenage athletes seem to be gravitating to other sports, not football.
Admittedly, this is only an observational view. But my eyes tell me that both baseball and basketball are seeing a surge in big athletic kids—that is, a bunch of young men that traditionally look more like football players than baseball or basketball players. More and more, I find myself seeing someone such as Aaron Judge or Boogie Cousins and thinking, They would be a great defensive end, tight end, wide receiver or even quarterback. I’m convinced that even just 10 years ago they would have been putting on helmets.
Look: I don’t disagree with the point Todd goes on to make — that the NFL is likely underestimating the long term risk it faces as the cumulative risks of football become clearer and clearer. But there is exactly nothing in what Todd says above that supports a conclusion that premier youth atheletes are choosing other sports over football. Nada. Zip, zero, nuthin’.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last decade or so of politics, it is that the gut feelings, the “observational view,” the assumptions-not-in-evidence held (often unconsiously) by the elite commentariat are really dreadful guides to both process and (especially) the substance of politics and policy. Here Todd confirms that such half-assed, privileged, deeply lazy approaches to complicated subjects is the default. It’s what he does; it may be who he is.
Now one crappy column on a subject off his beat, likely written in the nooks and crannies of a busy (if not fruitful) working life is a thin reed on which to build an indictment of one person, much less his whole guild. But hell. It’s Saturday; I’m off to do my real work in a moment; and why should the Village have all the license and all the fun. Chuck Todd’s risible SI scribblings are at least a measure of the man, if not the full spec. Todd himself is a member in very good standing of a guild of commentators who hold the most influential ground in American political media…
Would it be wrong to speculate that the flaws evident in this bit of off-topic fishwrap do in fact reveal the awful truth of the Village in all its infamy?
It would be wrong not to.
Annnnnnd….that was much ado about precious little. This thread: it is open.
Image: Jan Roos, Narcissus at the Spring, 1638 or earlier.
karensky
I think Todd spent a couple of summers with David Brooks at a very flawed writing camp.
Nicole
This was a great post. It’s really infuriating to realize how utterly incurious most of the big names in political commentary are. I wonder if it’s because so many of them are children of rich folk, so they have grown up with a natural disinclination for hard work (like fact checking!) and an overly inflated sense of the value of their poorly researched opinions/feelings.
Citizen_X
No, I think this is illuminating. Remember a few years ago, before Chuck hit the Big Time, and he was a fairly data-driven political analyst? He was not bad at that job. And he–as many before him–could have gone that route in sports writing, producing a solid stats-heavy analysis.
But no. Instead, he has to give his “observational view.” (Nice bit of redundant padding there, isn’t it?)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
also the author of
I tend to change the channel when he comes on, but from what I’ve seen he really likes to talk about his Beltway social life. I was wishing Charlie Pierce, or somebody willing to snort derisively, had been on set when he brought coverage of one of the debates to a halt to assure all the viewers that Kellyanne Conway, who had just completed spewing I forget what torrent of bullshit, wasn’t “just good at her job, but she’s a good person”, in the most simpering tone imaginable. At the time, she was merely helping a racist demagogue shred the fabric of our polity, but I’m sure she helped Chuck and his wife get their kid into a good preschool, or some such upper class favor. He’s big on the “my good friend” and hinting that he knows what the people you see on TV are really like. When Boehner retired, with the little zippity-doo-dah song, Todd gushed for five minutes, assuring us that this was the John Boehner you got to know over a drink, or after a game of golf. No mention of his role in creating the mess he was walking away from.
And I think it was Russert who started the whole, “Never mind all this politics, I’m a regular guy who loves football. Go Bills! Can I tell you about my dad…” crap. And compared to the tools who succeeded him, Russert is almost half the man the Beltway thought he was.
Betty
Bravo, Tom. Todd is insufferable, no matter the topic. Nothing but mediocrity in most TV commentary. Fortunately, I am able to watch Al Jazeera (for now) and France 24 so my exposure to Todd and co. is limited.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Yup, ol’ Chuckles is trying too hard.
You know I’m a Shakespeare fan cuz I read Titus Andronicus!
You know I’m an Angels fan cuz I remember Rudy Meoli!
Damn fool is well-paid for this crap….
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Any chance of a TL take, Tom, on the state of science research in America under the watch of Humpty Trumpty?
(FSM, I hope Trumpty has a great fall!)
Brachiator
A long and winding, but illuminating takedown.
However, as another poster noted, Todd is often good at data driven political analysis. Unlike other pundits, he is neither intimidated nor bamboozled by math. And he generally can communicate well what is significant and point out what is mere noise.
But elsewhere he can be as mediocre as the other Villagers.
This was a fun read on a lazy and already warm Southern California morning.
gene108
There are 10 year olds managing their own fantasy football teams, who know more about the modern NFL than Todd does.
japa21
As a life long Packer fan, I am more than upset that Chuckles states he is one as well. BTW, sights are not holy. I believe the word he was probably looking for is shrine (which would fit with Canton). There is something special about Lambeau Field, however. And I can say that since I was watching Packer games from the seats before it was called Lambeau.
James Powell
I’m not going to read Todd’s column, but a question for intrepid ones who did: when Todd is going on about the kids today choosing basketball and baseball instead of football, does he mention that MLB and NBA players get guaranteed contracts several sizes larger than NFL players?
Thornton Hall
I always ask, “where did this pundit do his field work?”
Actually, that’s not true. I never ask that because I already know the answer. The media makes close to zero effort to recruit former politicians as pundits. The media is thus “informed” solely by working politicians whose job it is to manipulate the media.
It’s like if Jane Goodall studied chimps by asking one chimp to lie to her.
MattF
IMO, there are just too many self-satisfied idiots out there to keep track of. Or to bother trying to figure out exactly how any given one does his/her dirty work. You really get nothing out of the attempt, and just waste time and effort. You could have been taking a nap.
Find some commentator you (sorta) believe on the facts, and who has some grasp of the (important!) distinction between honest and dishonest, and– you’re most of the way home.
lollipopguild
One of the best kool kidz on the inside looking out at all of you nobodies was/is the Carville/Matalin marriage. If the two of them really believed what they both spout in public how could you possibly get married? They can be happily married because they are both political performance artists like Alex Jones who really do not believe what they say in public. Our country is going to die because it is more important for all of the insiders to get along no matter what some of them are doing to wreck our country.
SiubhanDuinne
@Thornton Hall:
With this, you have perfectly summarized the entire Village-Beltway relationship.
Ruckus
@Nicole:
Not hard to be incurious when you get paid quite well being so.
I also wonder if their disinclination for hard work (as an industrialized blue collar worker most of my life) is that they’ve never done any at all and have no appreciation is that they have an overly inflated sense of their own worth, this being as many tend to use wealth to measure a persons value. They can not understand that a person, any person has value, only wealth has value. This concept that everyone has value, just because they exist and we state so in our founding documents, doesn’t invade their minds. Women get paid less, or nothing, so they have less value. Blacks allowed themselves to be slaves and work for nothing, therefore they have no value. This country was founded upon the idea that this isn’t so. But we never changed the minds of most to achieve that. We haven’t sold the concept.
That industrialized blue collar worker idea I stated is that I work with my hands, I do manual labor, standing most of the day, but it is nothing like being a concrete worker/mason, or a carpenter, or many other jobs we also consider blue collar. There used to be a concept among the common man that hard work was good for you. It does give you a sense of satisfaction, building, creating, fixing, reshaping a physical thing. It also can tear you down physically, wear out the entire body. And I think that a lot of that idea of hard work is good for you came from people who didn’t do any but paid other people to do it and kept the fruits of the other’s labor.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Like I said before – this group of pundits has lived way too long and is way too healthy.
I want the whiskey drinking, cigarette smoking muckrakers again. People who did obituaries and social features for 3 years before joining the city desk. People who got threatened by the mayor’s office or the corrupt alderman, occasionally took a punch to the face by somebody who had a beef, and who’d shouted “I quit” at their editor a half dozen times before burying the hatchet over drinks at some shithole dive.
lollipopguild
@gene108: There are 10 year olds who understand trump and politics better than Todd does.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Ruckus:
Whenever I see anybody denigrating a mere burger flipper aspiring to $15 an hour, I want to shake them until their necks are severed.
What none of the assholes who decry that understand is the number of decisions and amount of organization a short order cook has to perform in order to turn out a decent product. Timing, working inventory, satisfactory team performance are all a part of it, and those burger flippers, counter personnel and store management are the businesses’ first point of contact with every customer. The value added by the labor, attention to detail and customer goodwill are a huge part of what the profit is based on – and they should get a greater share of it.
TaMara (HFG)
Hi Tom! Sorry for the big foot, I scheduled it to publish and went out to garden. :-(
We stomp because we love.
Ruckus
@lollipopguild:
There are 10 yr olds who would make a far better president than drumpf.
1. They can read and understand. Their minds are not closed.
2. Their minds accept new ideas. Their minds are not closed.
3. Their minds know how to value new ideas, to look at them and see reality.
4. They aren’t fat old men with highly over inflated senses of self worth.
5. They have to live in the future they shape. They aren’t trying to create a lasting misimpression of their (lack of) value to the world.
Betty Cracker
Thank you for reading that so I don’t have to! And yes, it is illuminating.
PS: I finally got a recipe you’d expressed interest in ages ago (probably thought I’d forgot!), and since this is an open thread, recipe follows:
GRANDMA F’S CINNAMON ROAST CHICKEN
INGREDIENTS:
1 5-lb. or so roasting chicken
5 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered
5 carrots, peeled and cut into large-ish pieces
1 head of garlic, roughly peeled with top cut off
5 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
Stick of butter, softened
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
Cinnamon
INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350. Wash chicken and pat dry. Put garlic head in cavity, and place chicken in a large roasting pan (rack not necessary).
Place potatoes and carrots in a large bowl. Add all the butter save two tablespoons, pour in a few glugs of olive oil and add half the minced garlic. Salt and pepper generously, sprinkle lightly with cinnamon, then toss with your hands to coat. Turn potato and carrot mixture into roasting pan, arranging veggies around chicken.
Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, the rest of the butter and the rest of the garlic to the bowl that until recently held the veggies. Mix together with your hands, and rub mixture all over chicken. Work your fingers under skin on chicken breast and add some of the mixture there as well. Generously salt and pepper chicken, lightly sprinkle with cinnamon and place in oven.
Roast until done (usually about 2 hours for a 5-lb chicken), basting chicken and veggies every 20 minutes with pan juices. If the pan goes dry, drizzle chicken and veggies with olive oil.
When the chicken is done and golden brown, remove to serving plate and tent with foil. Allow to rest for 20 minutes or so. If the veggies are brown around the edges, they’re ready for serving. If not, give them a stir, turn up the heat in the oven and roast them until caramelized.
TriassicSands
@James Powell:
Does it make any difference that in most cases the different sports require very different physical attributes? Michael Jordan was an above average basketball player, but couldn’t make it in baseball. He’d probably have been a fairly poor linebacker or tight end, too. The words “broken in two” keep going through my mind.
Ruckus
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Also, without them, there is no profit. No income. None.
All the stoves, fryers, patties, buns, stores would just be piles of crap without the people to build and operate them. Same for every business ever. Even a one person business depends on others to create tools, materials to use, buildings to work in, money to purchase the things/ideas/concepts he’s selling. Even chuckles is supposed to provide a profit for the owners of the paper he “works” for. That so many of the major papers are losing money speaks volumes about the quality of the workers the owners hired to create content and continue to (over)pay. You create crap, you have to sell crap. At some point enough people figure out that your crap is not worth paying for and you either change or run out of capital.
TriassicSands
@Ruckus:
So, let me get this right — you’d prefer Barron Trump to be president in place of his father. Hmm, yeah, I could see that. It all depends on how much influence Donald has had on the kid and what Melania has done to him. (Barron’s 11.) It’s hard to imagine him being much worse, but then I think of the other Trump offspring and worse is possible. Not necessarily probable, but possible.
Vince
In what universe does DeMarcus Cousins look like he belongs in the NFL? He’s 6’11” which would make him, by far, the tallest player in the NFL. It would make him one of the tallest players in NFL history.
Vince
@TriassicSands:
Personally, I think a lot of these guys could have been successful in multiple sports. There have been multiple, successful NFL players that played NCAA basketball but not football but made the switch in the pros.
TriassicSands
Of course you care. It’s Chuck effing Todd for Trump’s sake. The Toddster! Todd the Bod! Everyone cares. Ab-so-lute-ly everybody. Why, he must have a vigintillion* followers on Twitter.
* Vigintillion was my favorite number as a child — it was the largest number named in my family’s dictionary. It’s 1 followed by 63 zeros. I’ll Todd doesn’t know that!
and
I saw an article about that some time ago in either the Post or the Times (I think.) I didn’t read the article (because I don’t care which sports youth athletes choose) but Todd probably saw the article or one like it (perhaps in his favorite magazine, Poseur’s Digest) and adopted the information as his own.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
If you chose any ten yr old at random, he won’t qualify, as you say he’s 11.
Wasn’t considering a relative of his to replace him. No need to follow one disaster with another, and even if we don’t know Barron, he’d be suspect just by association. Even if we shouldn’t suspect him by association drumpf’s other spawn all are suspect so what are the odds?
Librarian
@japa21: Actually, through word he’s looking for is “site”, but he spelled it wrong. What an idiot.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Betty Cracker:
SO Greek…
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Vince:
QB or WR would be decent jobs…
Kathleen
@Nicole: @karensky: My thoughts exactly, All he would need to add is something something about elite liberals who eschew football and other manly sports and what about marginalized white guys.
Ruckus
@Vince:
If he can pass he’s so much taller that he could throw over the heads of any offensive line. And his arm length should give him impressive throwing leverage. But there is a lot more arms, legs, torso to grab as well, so that might be a problem.
A side note.
I’ve known 2 NFL players. One played mostly for the Browns and one played for the 49ers. Between them maybe 20 yrs of play. Between them they might have one original knee and hip joints left. Above the shoulders the situation isn’t much better. Both good guys, both with injuries to the brain. What are the chances that I’ve met at random 2 NFL players and they are the only two NFL players with massive lifelong injuries? Which the teams and NFL don’t support their healthcare after they stop playing. Hard for me to get behind a game that severely damages it’s players, all the while making a shit ton of money off them and then leaves them to rot. This is my observation, I didn’t hear this from these two men.
The Lodger
@Ruckus: For a former boss of mine, the best years of his life ended when he seriously messed up his leg playing high school football. High school.
The Lodger
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So one of his hires went on to become editor in chief of the Weekly Standard? That’s like hearing a guy you hired for your restaurant is now QA manager for Big Reginald’s House of Ptomaine.
Another Scott
I haven’t read Todd’s piece, and I don’t care about football. But perhaps he’s auditioning to replace George Will (once he retires) as the Universally [sic] Beloved [sic] Political Analyst and Sports Writer. Or something.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@James Powell: I assume it has something to do with the relative strength of the unions. On a lark, I decided to look at the NFLPA web page. I scrolled down to the bottom to check the copyright (I often do that) to see that it says “2014”. :-/
They have a page on the Salary Cap (that didn’t want to load originally, but eventually did). $170M/90 players = 1.88M/yr average. The guys in the trenches aren’t getting rich, especially if they hope to have enough money to live on and pay their bills if they’re fortunate enough to live past 60…
“But baseball players have to pay ~ 170 games while football players play 16. Of course they should get paid less!!11” I guess that’s why football team owners make so much less than baseball team owners, huh.
I’m hoping that the decline in viewership continues:
At what point, indeed.
Cheers,
Scott.
BillCinSD
Even if teenage athletes are not choosing football as much as they used to, I’m not sure how a 25 and a 26 year old show this to be the case. Judge at least did play football and basketball in addition to baseball in high school, and had scholarship offers to play football in college but ceased being a teen near the end of Obama’s first term. Cousins doesn’t appear to have played other sports, probably because he was 6’9″ in HS