Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael knew she wasn’t a representative American. The onetime New Yorker film critic is famous in folk memory for having said she didn’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, when he won a 49-state landslide.  The way her words are misremembered, she was surprised that someone so reviled by her social set could win the White Hous

Similar to Pauline Kael's reputed famous line in 1968 that she couldn't understand how Nixon won, since nobody she knew voted for him, on CNN This Morning co-host Phil Mattingly says the people he talks to can't understand how Donald Trump can remain tied with Joe Biden in the polls. 

Call it Niall Ferguson's Pauline Kael moment . . . During the roundtable segment this morning on ABC's This Week, Ferguson, an academic with appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, said that "all the Texans I know" can't stand Rick Perry. Ferguson was reacting to host Christiane Amanpour's question about Perry's highly-animated New Hampshire address.  Ferguson professed to like the "…

Breaking down the front door of a suspected al-Qaeda stronghold in Fallujah took great courage. But even that fearless feat pales in comparison to the dangerous mission that Willie Geist undertook. The intrepid member of the Morning Joe crew ventured out onto the sidewalks of Manhattan's Upper West Side wearing . . . a McCain-Palin T-shirt, trying to drum up support for the Republican ticket…

Tom Brokaw had his Pauline Kael moment on MSNBC this morning.  Though the story might be apocryphal, the late New Yorker film critic is famously credited with saying she was shocked by Nixon's 1972 victory, since everybody she knew had voted for McGovern.Here's Brokaw on today's "Morning Joe," discussing the importance of the upcoming debates.TOM BROKAW: Debates should be judged on two big counts…