by David Greenberg

I've always wondered why The New Yorker, with its huge stable of talented political journalists--Goldberg, Grann, Hertzberg, Lemann, Mayer, Packer, Singer, Toobin, and Walsh, not to mention Remnick--continues to use glossy-magazine feature writers who lack much feel for politics, such as Connie Bruck and Peter Boyer, to cover politics. The pitfalls of putting these people to use in covering politics was seen in Boyer's bizarre hit job on Wesley Clark in 2004 for his leadership in Kosovo, in his puff piece painting the Reverend Billy Graham as some kind of a moderate, and now again in his strange piece on the Democratic Senate candidate in Virginia, Jim Webb. Boyer's piece contains the line:

[Howard] Dean's point (and Webb's) is that Democrats cannot succeed in the South until the Party broadens its tent, becoming less insistent on such matters of current Party orthodoxy as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage.

What, exactly, does Boyer presume the Democratic party orthodoxy to be on gay marriage? Virtually every major Democratic leader opposes gay marriage--including the current liberal darling, Barack Obama--though many favor civil unions. I can't find polls that break down respondents into Democrats and Republicans, but given that only 22 percent of Americans favor gay marriage, according to a July 2006 Princeton Survey Research Associates poll (another 31 percent back civil unions), it is highly improbable that a majority of Democrats do. If there's anything approaching a party orthodoxy among Democrats, it's opposition to gay marriage, albeit with significant support for civil unions. Sloppy journalism that implies otherwise allows Republicans to get away with painting the Democrats as out of the mainstream, on not just this issue but a range of others. Boyer's uncritical acceptance of conservative talking points stamps them with validity, since they're appearing as plain fact in a mainstream, ostensibly non-partisan news organization. Thus, they gain currency not just on the right but across the spectrum, and the Democrats get tarred as dangerously radical on social issues when they're not.