"David S. Broder: Reporter.
Of all the epitaphs that might fit him - journalist, columnist, commentator, author, teacher, student of politics - we think our friend and colleague Dave Broder, who died Wednesday at age 81, would likely be most pleased with the one-word description we offer above. Mr. Broder was a columnist for many years, but he started out as a reporter and remained one for a lifetime. Like most reporters, he clearly learned , from the time of his first job on the Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph, a basic lesson of the business: that the story you expect to write when you set out on an assignment never quite matches up with the one you find when you get there. Or, as he put it in one of his books, sometimes "the moment comes when the disappointed reporter has to tell an editor, 'It doesn't check out.'"
When [my eldest son] Carl was at the Baltimore Sun, a young reporter complained that one of the prima donnas in our business had treated him shoddily. Carl told him to forget it and to think instead of the example set by Broder. "Don't ever think it's necessary to be puffed up," Carl advised the young reporter. When I was a teenager, he said, David Broder never came to our house and didn't ask me what I was doing or how I felt. He is the greatest of them all, and he never had a swelled head."And, from colleague Joel Achenbach:
"A number of ideologues, particularly in Blogworld, hated him for his political leanings, which were very close to being perfectly vertical. But that was enraging: He anchored himself in the political center, and religiously espoused good government, compromise solutions and bipartisanship. Naturally, the true believers viewed him as a dangerous moderate, a dinosaur, a centrist crank."Outside the Beltway:
"His name became something of an epithet on the Left, with “Broderism” used to describe a neutral and bland form of commentary that refused to call out truly bad conduct in the name of bipartisan objectivity. But Broder was simply a holdover from an era where journalists–even columnists–thought they were in the business of covering the news rather than making policy."
We normally think of "High Broderism" as the worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. But in reality this is just the cover Broder uses for his real agenda, the defense of what he perceives to be "the establishment" at all costs. The establishment is the permanent ruling class of Washington, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. Democracy's messy, in Broder's world, and passionate voters are problematic. It is up to the Wise Old Men of Washington to implement the agenda, and the job of the voters to bless them for it. When the establishment fails, the most important issue is not their failure, but that the voters might begin to lose faith in and deference for their betters. Thus, people must always be allowed to save face, no matter what their transgressions, as long as they're a part of his permanent floating tea party.posted by ennui.bz at 1:37 PM on March 9, 2011 [11 favorites]
While this basic attitude isn't unique to Broder, his apparent lack of interest in the actual details of policy makes him a more absurd figure than some. For him it's not about results, but about the right people being in the right places. It is terribly elitist in all the wrong ways. Arguments can be made for certain types of elitism - you do want a brain surgeon conducting brain surgery - but Broder's elites are simply aristocrats. It's their town.
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posted by zarq at 11:59 AM on March 9, 2011