Ever wonder why exactly it is that you can't place so many of the folks the cable news shows put on the air as Democratic or Republican "strategists"? Politico's Daniel Libit explains:
Jane Fleming Kleeb went on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks ago to talk about global warming, a topic on which, by her own admission, she’s hardly an expert. So who, then, is Jane Fleming Kleeb? Well, according to the Chyron that flashed across the screen after Bill O’Reilly introduced her, she is a “Democratic strategist.” But she’s hardly that, either.
“The first time they called me a strategist,” Fleming Kleeb recalls, “I literally laughed on TV.” ...Among the things that the proliferation of TV cable news has wrought is slackened standards for what constitutes a political strategist. Now used as a catchall tag for a whole host of people with varied — and often peripheral — backgrounds in electoral politics, the term has all but lost its meaning....
“What’s frustrating for people who worked on campaigns is seeing these folks second-guessing decisions every day,” says one Republican strategist who has been a veteran of several presidential campaigns. “It has to be like an astronaut who spent their whole career and life trying to get to space, and you’ve got somebody who has never been there giving you an opinion of what it’s like on the moon.”
You can read the whole thing here.
--Christopher Orr