This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt of 2016, a tumultuous year. I hope the year has treated you well, and 2017 brings happy times for all of us.
Good Riddance, John Kerry
John Kerry’s been very good to me in some ways; it was the 2004 Kerry Spot blog that brought me to National Review. Having said that, he’s been very wrong about a lot of big foreign-policy issues over the course of his career, with the consistent theme that he’s almost always willing to give the world’s most hostile states the benefit of the doubt: Daniel Ortega, aid to North Korea, Yassir Arafat, Bashir Assad. . . time and time again, Kerry’s been willing to offer a trusting hand, and no matter how many times he gets bitten, he’s never gotten more wary.
But when it comes to Israel, then he gets tough.
Thus, it’s fitting that John Kerry’s last major act as secretary of state is a speech that offers up hot nonsense, a bitterly hostile address that called Israel’s government “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.” (Mind you, the opposing side in this conflict elected Hamas, an actual terrorist group, to govern the Gaza Strip.)
The cement hardens on the Obama-Kerry foreign-policy legacy: They were toothless and hapless against ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and the world’s worst and most ruthless regimes. But as for Bibi Netanyahu, they came down on him like a ton of bricks.
The Three Martini Lunch Awards of 2016…
If you’re not listening to the Three Martini Lunch podcast this week, you’re missing the Annual Awards that Greg Corombus and I give out to the year’s best and worst political figures. We use the old McLaughlin Group categories, and it feels particularly odd and sad to not have the legendary television host John McLaughlin himself on the air anymore, offering his own. He was my pick for “Sorry to See You Go” in a year when far too many big names left us too early; The McLaughin Group gets blamed for a lot of the problems in today’s television, but it was qualitatively different from today’s offerings. The panelists were there for their knowledge, bold thinking, and quick wits, they actually got along off-camera no matter how loud and heated the on-screen debates could get, and, at least by my young eyes in the late 1980s and 90s, they made politics fun. These days Saturday Night Live does news parodies, portraying pundits as dumb; Dana Carvey’s funhouse-mirror version of McLaughlin wasn’t dumb, just hilariously insane.
Greg Corombus picked the figure I suspect most readers would offer: Antonin Scalia.
A couple selections…
Most Underrated Political Figure: Ohio GOP Senator Rob Portman, who just crushed Ted Strickland by 21 points on Election Day. For perspective, in 2010, a midterm year, he won about 2.1 million votes. This year he won more than 3 million votes. This was the second-most votes ever for a Senate candidate in Ohio ever; the first was Voinovich in 2004, and that one was never really considered competitive. Then again, neither was this year’s.
Most Overrated Political Figure: I was thinking of naming Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, but let’s let him off the hook: He went into a Senate reelection fight that everybody figured would be close and Rubio won by 8 points. He’s still got some game.
Would it be harsh to name the Bush family? It’s not just that Jeb Bush didn’t win, it’s that he really didn’t coalesce the “establishment” behind him. Finished with 3 delegates, about 280,000 votes… We had a sense as 2016 dawned that the world of Republican politics had passed Jeb Bush by. None of the Bushes endorsed Trump other than George P. Bush in Texas.
Most Honest Political Figure: I don’t know whether she meets the technical definition of a “political figure,” but I’m going to give this to Salena Zito, formerly of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, now writing for the New York Post and contributing to CNN. Because she’s based in Western Pennsylvania, she’s been talking to voters in the Rust Belt for a long while, and there are very few reporters and analysts who write about the working-class whites with a better, or more nuanced eye. She isn’t a relentless cheerleader, she isn’t afraid to spotlight the ugly side, but she always writes with great sensitivity and clarity about he lives of these Americans who really don’t get much attention in the traditional media portrait of the country as a whole.
Most Under-Reported Story: The national sports media noticed the NFL enduring a ratings slide, but almost no one noticed that the ratings for college football remained the same. And the ratings for the non-biggest-game of the week were actually 10 percent higher than the previous year, suggesting that it’s something unique to the NFL, not to football, concussions, commercial breaks, too many games, etcetera.
So you put together the NFL ratings slide, the all-women Ghostbusters reboot flopping, enrollment down sharply at the University of Missouri, the short-lived crusade against the hosts of “Fixer Upper” on HGTV, this was the year of the backlash against political correctness, and it didn’t happen overnight. This was building, online outrage by online outrage, for a long time, and it blindsided most of the media. Political correctness was never popular, but you would never know it from the way the media talks about these issues. You would never know that almost half the country doesn’t support gay marriage. You would never know that the majority of people think there are two genders.
The most under-reported story of 2016 is the supreme unpopularity of political correctness and the “Social Justice Warrior” philosophy.
Most Over-Reported Story: I was tempted to go with hate crimes, since so many of them turn out to be hoaxes, but I’m going with Hillary Clinton’s ground game and state offices. In mid-autumn, Politico surveyed Democratic strategists and operatives and three-quarters convinced their party was set to do a better job of turning out their base voters in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Hillary Clinton’s multitudes of state offices didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Clearly, her team was as blindsided as anyone else. All those data metrics, all those surveys, all that technology . . . In the end, all of that didn’t help her win a race where she was the front-runner all along. What’s more, none of that stuff gave her a clue that she was losing it. There has been a real Cult of Data built in the world of political campaigns, and I’ve genuflected a time or two to the idea that everything can be quantified, measured, and calculated.
ADDENDA: Debbie Reynolds, too? So that’s how it’s going to be, huh, 2016?
The final pop culture podcast of 2016 will arrive tomorrow, featuring tributes to George Michael and Carrie Fisher, the best television of the year (and the year that on-demand service programming caught up with premium cable), facets of life that today’s kids just wouldn’t understand like “Be Kind, Rewind” and cassette tapes, and what we’re looking forward to in 2017.