Plastic bullshit.

Brendan Nyhan eviscerates James Carville & Mark Penn's dumb WaPo op-ed on why Hillary Clinton is electable, using, like, numbers and stuff. Various bloggers have been complaining about the op-ed, but I haven't yet seen anybody reflect my initial negative reaction while browsing it this morning:

We don't know if Hillary is going to run for president, but as advisers who have worked on the only two successful Democratic presidential campaigns in the past couple of decades, we know that if she does run, she can win that race, too.


Ignoring the tired self-promotion -- you won 49% against Bob Dole, congrats -- of course Penn, HRC's pollster, knows whether she's running or not. If HRC's own staff didn't know her political plans then her operation wouldn't be worth supporting. Carville and Penn feed us this crap as part of the running HRC narrative about how focussed she is on winning her New York Senate seat again. It's a meaningless but perfectly obvious lie.

I don't know why. I'm a pragmatist with no special loathing of the political "establishment". But, somehow, being overtly bullshitted like this leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. Plastic.