The punditry game

3 September 2008, 2057 EDT

The youtube video of Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy saying what they really think about McCain’s pick of Palin as VP will obviously get a lot of play among left-wing circles. But it is probably more significant as a window (if not a particularly surprising one) into the nature of contemporary punditry.

As Taegan Goddard points out, Noonan’s frank assessment of what Palin’s pick means–“It’s over”–directly contradicts her “own column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Noonan clearly views her job as boosting her party rather than calling it as she sees it. I’d wager that outlook is pretty common across party and ideological lines.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.