Matt Bai

Through sympathetic alchemy, New York Times Magazine political writer Matt Bai managed to transform Barack Obama's factually loose biography as a sign of "his narrative sophistication, his novelistic instinct for developing themes and characters that make his point" in his profile capturing the disappointment of Obama's supporters (which seem to include Bai himself), "Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief."

Bill Clinton the centrist, Rush Limbaugh among the "far right"? That's the gist of New York Times magazine political writer Matt Bai's thesis Wednesday on how the former president may actually have hurt President Obama's chances for reelection. Bai also made his usual case about "extreme forces" in the Republican Party.

Bai argued that Clinton made a strategic misstep when he advised Obama to hammer Romney as a "severe conservative."

Political writer Matt Bai wrote "Is There Life After Mitt?" for the upcoming issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Besides cheap cracks at Michele Bachman and (again) calling conservatives anti-modern "extremists," there's a definite "Death of Conservatism" vibe to Bai's analysis. Times editor Sam Tanenhaus's 2009 book of that name was forcefully rebutted by the Tea Party movement that same year. How will Bai's analysis fare come the November elections?

Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, delivered Sunday a 10,000-word epic cover story on last summer's failed debt negotiations between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner: "Who Killed the Debt Deal?" Bai, who appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday to say the public was missing "all the good things" Obama-care will do for them, and sees a racial element in virtually every GOP attack on Obama, basically sided with the president in his epic tick-tock on the debt negotiation imbroglio that captured D.C. last summer.

It follows the Washington Post's 4,600-word effort on March 17, which leaned toward Obama as the chief culprit in the failed negotiations: "Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner -- already facing long odds -- to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed."

Reeling from the possibility the Supreme Court might undermine ObamaCare, two members in good standing of the liberal media elite, both with the New York Times, took to the Sunday shows to lament the lack of public recognition for the great benefits of the law. “On health care,” columnist Tom Friedman rationalized on NBC’s Meet the Press, “that’s partly a failure of communication.”

A befuddled Friedman advanced the liberal narrative that blames communication, not facts, as he wondered: “How do you go a year and a half where so many Americans don’t even understand the benefits of this legislation when they apply to them? And that gets to this administration, which I think has been abysmal at communicating some of its most important agenda items.”

New York Times political reporter Matt Bai still hasn’t forgotten the "overtly racist" Willie Horton ad and sees "a racial element" in just about every attack against President Obama, no matter what the issue. His latest "Political Times" column, "Race and Republican Attacks on Obama," posted online Tuesday, pivoted from Newt Gingrich’s latest press drubbing to the matter of racism and the G.O.P.

Newt Gingrich did his level best to appear level in his "Meet the Press" interview Sunday, maintaining a mostly subdued, thoughtful tone except for one telling moment -- when David Gregory, the host, asked him if his labeling of President Obama as the "food stamp president" might have racist connotations. "Oh, come on," the former House speaker huffed. "That’s bizarre." All he meant, Mr. Gingrich went on to explain, was that Mr. Obama’s policies would turn all of America into Detroit, which probably didn’t endear him to Eminem.

Bai turned virtually every attack hurled at Obama into a racially tinged assault.

Is there a racial element to some of the attacks on President Obama? It’s pretty hard to argue there isn’t, when a conservative writer like Dinesh D’Souza argues that Mr. Obama sees the world like an African nationalist (a theory Mr. Gingrich praised again in his interview Sunday), or when Donald J. Trump asserts that Mr. Obama isn’t smart enough to have gotten into Harvard or to have written his own books.

After accusing presidential candidate Newt Gingrich of racism during an interview on Sunday's Meet the Press, NBC host David Gregory later posed this question to the show's political panel: "Do you think he [Gingrich] dialed back the reputation as...a flamethrower?...I mean, talking about Obama and anti-colonial views, about anti-Americanism."

The mostly liberal panelists used the opportunity to bash Gingrich and the Republican 2012 field in general. Time magazine political analyst Mark Halperin remarked that "the animating force in the Republican Party today is be in Barack Obama's face, be aggressive, be out to destroy his presidency."

Newt Gingrich: He’s no Mario Cuomo.

New York Times political writer Matt Bai’s "Political Memo" Wednesday was pretty hostile to the battle-scared Republican leader considering a 2012 run for president: "Gingrich’s Run Reflects His Sense of History." Bai led off by asking "Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?" given that he "has never been elected to anything outside his old Congressional district in Georgia." (And, by the way, rose to Speaker of the House.)

But back on April 10 Bai confessed to being awestruck with his proximity to a liberal lion, former New York Gov. Cuomo: "...there is something awesome - in the literal sense - about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo."

Judging from his opening lines Wednesday, Bai was not nearly as impressed with the conservative Newt.

Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?

This week’s edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is chock full of liberal media quotes showing reporters’ slanted approach to the tax and budget issues now at center stage. In fact, there’s so much bad material, we had to add an extra page to our usually three-page newsletter (you can view/download the PDF here).

The whole issue is up over at www.MRC.org. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the worst quotes (including two video clips), all collected in the last couple of weeks:

Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, celebrated the “grace and gravitas” of former New York State governor and perpetual Democratic presidential hopeful Mario Cuomo, “Papa Doesn’t Preach – Mario Cuomo would be a perfect elder statesman, if only his son’s generation wanted one.”

Bai talked to the elder Cuomo, whose son Andrew is governor of New York, at his office at a Midtown law firm. The profile begins with Cuomo in charmlessly pedantic mode, with a lecture on the precise meaning of the word “proud.” Bai admired him as one of the liberal “titans of the day.”

If you were a kid in the Northeast during the 1980s, as I was, there is something awesome -- in the literal sense -- about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo, even if he now misplaces names and occasionally grasps for the point of an anecdote that has fluttered just out of reach. He was, at that time, the anti-Reagan, a powerful and resonant voice of dissent in the age of “Top Gun” and Alex P. Keaton. Cuomo, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were the three titans of the day who seemed to possess the defiance needed to rescue liberalism from obsolescence.

In contrast, Bai’s reporting shows hostility toward conservative ideas and people, notably a July 18, 2010 story in which he conjured up a fiction of “hateful 25-year-olds” hurling racial slurs at Tea Party rallies.

Matt Bai’s upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine cover profile of Chris Christie, New Jersey's attention-getting Republican governor, has its questionable moments, but the overall tone was far more temperate than a teaser the Times used to promote it, featured on the front page of nytimes.com Thursday evening.

The segment of Bai's long story the Times chose to highlight is one that just happens to feed into the liberal complaint that President Ronald Reagan stigmatized welfare recipients as "welfare queens." (Bai's reference to "welfare queens" in the text is milder in context.)

The teaser reads: "The governor of New Jersey became the most celebrated Republican in America by tagging public-sector workers -- especially teachers -- as 21st-century welfare queens."

On Sunday, New York Times political reporter/columnist Matt Bai wondered if we are at the start of a “terrifying new” moment in political violence in “A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?” Bai argued that the act of Republican politicians saying standard political things was somehow fueling the rhetorical flames.

He at least appeared evenhanded at the beginning.

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

On Sunday, the New York Times issued a surprise half-correction to the unverified claim, made in Matt Bai's July 18 story, that racial epithets were hurled at Democratic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis during protests against Obama-care at the U.S. Capitol on March 20. Bai wrote:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

The portion in bold above has now been omitted from the online version of Bai's story. Here's the correction, in Sunday's edition:

Just how much of a liberal cocoon does New York Times political reporter Matt Bai live in? Apparently a mighty thick one judging by the fact that he thought he could repeat a provably false lie about a supposed example of Tea Party racism in his most recent article. Almost everybody with even a little bit of political savvy can already guess what example I am referring to but let us allow Bai to repeat the false charge:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

New York Times writer Matt Bai's Thursday "Political Times" column, "A Risky Campaign Tactic: Unpleasant Truth," heralded the comeback of former liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee, who left the party after losing his re-election bid in 2006 and is running for governor of Rhode Island as an independent. What brave-if-brutal "truth" is Chafee telling? The need for tax hikes, naturally.

There's a lot of talk in Washington these days about "hard choices"-- specifically, about why no one ever seems to make them. A lot of policy experts and former members of Congress (who no longer have to run) will assure you, for instance, that the only way to shrink the national debt is through some combination of higher taxes and reduced spending on entitlement and military programs. The problem is that politicians generally want to keep their jobs, and they highly doubt the proposition that voters can be persuaded to embrace even modestly painful solutions in an unforgiving political environment.

This is precisely the proposition being tested, however, in this tiny state, where Lincoln Chafee is running for governor as an independent. Mr. Chafee, you may recall, served seven seemingly tortured years as a Republican senator opposed to his own president's agenda, before the voters -- exasperated with Republicans, period -- cut him loose in 2006. Adrift like other Republican moderates, Mr. Chafee broke with the party altogether and has now decided to run his own kind of highly unusual campaign, based on the risky premise that unpleasant times demand some unpleasant truths.

One of the New York Times's favorite themes is the ever-impending Republican civil war that will ruin the party's chances in whatever election that's coming up. Former chief political reporter Adam Nagourney is a past master, but he's now covering the West Coast. Luckily, Times contributor Matt Bai was there to fill the gap Thursday, explaining how the Republicans may blow a great opportunity through ruinous infighting in the primaries.

The assumption behind Bai's "Political Times" piece "For Republicans, Sorting Out Candidates Gets a Bit Messy" is that a crowded field of candidates in the Republican primaries is a bad thing.

A front-page, above-the-fold teaser distorted one of Bai's already premature judgements, leaving out his qualifier to suggest Republican prospects are already sunk: "Some critics are already asking Republican leaders how they managed to let a promising election season get so mightily out of control."

The New York Times's embrace of Barack Obama's candidacy, and its fervent defense of him against John McCain's "racist" and unfair attacks, made 2008 a particularly bias-packed year for the paper. During the 2008 campaign Times bias often came with a smile, instead of a snarl, with the Times and the rest of the mainstream media having fallen hard for Obama's "historic" candidacy (jilting its previous love, Hillary Clinton). The Times even praised the moderate maverick McCain for a while -- until he clinched the Republican nomination and became the only thing in the way of a groundbreaking victory for either a liberal woman (Clinton) or a liberal African-American (Obama).

Below are the favorite quotes from Times Watch's five Times-dissecting judges. You can read all of the worst quotes of Campaign 2008 at Times Watch.

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker, and Don Luskin, publisher of the blog The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, both chose this quote from reporter Steven Erlanger:

"On Thursday evening in a glittering Berlin, cheered by as many as 200,000 people, Mr. Obama delivered a tone poem to American and European ideals and shared history. In contrast, just before he spoke, Mr. McCain, was sitting in Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, having a bratwurst, and saying grumpily that he would prefer to speak to Germans when he is president, not before." -- Steven Erlanger in a July 26 filing from Paris while covering Barack Obama's world tour.

Matt Bai, a major contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, described John McCain's service in Vietnam in his big cover profile, "The McCain Doctrines," by suggesting that McCain's five years spent isolated in a POW camp meant he didn't learn the correct liberal lessons from the Vietnam War, resulting in his support for the Iraq War.

While the Times found Sen. John Kerry's service in Vietnam gave him credibility on his opposition to the Iraq War, McCain's five years spent isolated in a POW camp has evidently cursed him with the narrow perspective of America, right or wrong.

Explaining why McCain still supports the Iraq War, Bai wrote: