A few more points that grow out of the Sullivan article, which I didn't want to cram into the last post and which are loosely related.
First, The Atlantic made a terrible decision choosing this as this month's cover piece when it had Marc Ambinder's engrossing account of the conflict between the Clinton and Obama campaigns. It's ultimately unsurprising, but it's rather embarrassing just how much control the candidate's campaigns have over the media narrative, and I suspect Ambinder could've substantially expanded this piece. The Atlantic has always been a bit obsessed with Ideas, which is part of what has made the magazine great, but James Bennet seems to be more interested in specific, well-known people's ideas, no matter how silly or poorly thought out. Hence the insipid package on The American Idea, with all the usual suspects contributing, and a cover story on the idea of Barack Obama, written by Andrew Sullivan. The theory seems to be that all attention and all traffic is good, but this is the theory that The Atlantic has, historically, opposed. It has been a magazine aspiring to careful, methodical thought (embodied today by James Fallows), not attention-getting antics.
Second, it's impressive how Sullivan has parlayed his over-excitedness into a career. He is a man in a constant state of infatuation -- the only thing that changes is the subject. It doesn't matter that he's frequently wrong, because a talented writer who is constantly enthralled can produce good copy.
Recognizing that my views of Sullivan's work are quite obvious, I want to be clear that I am serious about this last point: The Atlantic needs to consider whether it's appropriate for someone with such a visceral, irrational hatred of a candidate to be spewing his nonsense all over their website, let alone in the pages of the magazine. In the Obama piece, Sullivan writes of Hillary Clinton -- with no support whatsoever -- that she is "primarily interested in winning power," that she "exhibit[s] plasticness and inauthenticity," that she "smell[s] . . . of political fear," and that a speech on her faith is "repellent" because it was done "tackily." This is dialed down compared to the vitriol that Sullivan displays on his blog, but his hatred -- and I choose that word carefully -- of Clinton is bound up with all of his views on the Democratic race, including his views of Barack Obama.
