Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person: A Series of Miraculous Conversions

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." -- Groucho Marx

 

This was Mr. Matthew Dowd auditioning for a permanent gig on MSNBC a couple of days ago.

"I think [Biden] needs to go a step further and say our democracy is broken and I am trying to repair it... One person being gone was not going to fix a systemic problem" - @matthewjdowd w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/iQXbW6O99h

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) April 28, 2021

And since you should not have to watch this video, here are some parts of it transcribed, free of charge, for your reading pleasure:

Dowd And I'm gonna speak some truth, not to you Nicole, but, uh, maybe other people on other networks or other platforms.  

driftglass: I'm ready Matthew Dowd!   Knock me out with your truth bomb!

Dowd We have to stop treating this like this is some game where the opposition on each side is the same.

driftglass:  Oh you must be fucking kidding me.

Dowd  That there's some equal value on Each Side.  That we're gonna listen to Kevin McCarthy and we'll listen to Nancy Pelosi and therefor we did our job.  We'll interview Ted Cruz and we'll interview a sane United States senator and we've done our job.

driftglass:  You're killin' me Smalls.

Dowd: ...But also, us in the media have to stop presenting this as if there are two equal partners in politics that we have to talk to. We don’t. You don’t talk to crazy people. You don’t talk to crazy people and we have to stop getting into a place where we equal the sides and we discuss it as if it’s some fun game that both players are equally responsible.

Ok.  Relax.  Breath.  

So here's the short of it.

During the 2016 election and well into the Trump administration election, Matthew Dowd wasn't just a Both Siderist.   He was the Both Siderist.  He was fanatical about it, and his fanaticism had a few, simple precepts --

• Both Sides are equally bad.  Therefor...
• The K'rupt Duopoly is the Enemy.  Therefor..
• Disrupting the System by voting third party is our only salvation.  Also...
• Most voters who support Trump are decent, sensible, patriots.  Only a few around the fringe are wackos.  Just like the Left!! 

-- which he rained down on his audience from his perch as ABC News' chief political analyst with all the fervor and fire of an Old Testament prophet.

The reason I know this is because I was one of the only people in the blogosphere with the nerve directly challenge Dowd's relentless Both Siderist.  To point out the the entire GOP had been on a rocket ride to crazytown for decades.  Because the Right had spent decades turning those voters into reprogrammable meatbags.  And that, in the fact the clear and present danger posed by the Right, the continued, mindless Both Siderism by the mainstream media being led by Matthew Dowd was incredibly reckless and irresponsible. 

Mr. Dowd responded to me saying these things by calling me stupid, insulting my readers and eventually blocking me on Twitter.

Skip forward less than five years, and the same Matthew Dowd no longer blocks me since I am permanently banned from Twitter.  But has blocked friends of mine for having the temerity to remind him of his own words from not so very long ago when he was Both Siderism's mightiest warrior.

But if you follow the antics and pronunciamientos of Mr. Matthew Dowd on the Twitter machine as he auditions for a permanent gig on MSNBC and shops article to USA Today, you will find, trailing in his wake, a large number of humans who are positively ecstatic at his bold-bordering-on-radical truth spewing.

Here is a very small sampling.

I cheered listening to Matthew, then tears, then rage. He is SO right. We must ALL stop the way the R corruption is covered- No comparison. But we must also remember "real" media/press actually helped elect trump which led to the R party destroying our country & democracy.

— Jodie is @HeyJudejo28 🌈 🐾 🌊🌊 (@HeyJudejo28) April 29, 2021

Thank you again @matthewjdowd for telling the truth about what is actually happening. The sides are not equal and are not driven by the same principles. The truth needs to be told about the lies and the liars. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 your words give me hope.

— DeuceFlash (@DeuceFlash) April 28, 2021

He really hits the meat of it for the media on both sidesism. You can't have a crazy, irresponsible person and a sane, responsible person and equate the two.

Dead on balls accurate.

— Annie's a Democracy Watchdog 🐕 (@Annie25CO) April 28, 2021

@matthewjdowd one of the smartest and most decent people in politics

— Jay Rouse (@JayRouseDC) April 29, 2021

Well said! The MSM definitely has to do a much better job! Stop letting people push untrues, then you report on what they said, without challenging those statements!

— Carol-A new beginning🇺🇸 (@FiredUpCarol) April 29, 2021

He's talking to you @chucktodd. And you @tedcruz, the Mad Senator. And he is 100% right.

— EffieATX (@AtxEffie) April 29, 2021

Love this guy, he is always on point

— janis fulks (@janisfulks) April 29, 2021

This isn't terribly surprising.  

For most people who skim politics, what happened last week or last month or last year is a blur.  But to me, Matthew Dowd is a textbook example of everything that is broken about the mainstream media, because mainstream media success is a matter of performative gesturing, not principle. 

Think about it this way.  So far as I know, no one who saw Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln stood up in the theater (remember theaters?) and shouted, "This is all bullshit!  That's not Abraham Lincoln!  That's 'Bill the Butcher' and ten years ago I saw him straight-up murder Monk McGinn!" because those were movies, and movies are make-believe, which is why, in the movies, the most murderous villains can wipe off the greasepaint, dive into another script, and show up a few years later as the noblest of heroes.

But what audience are given on "news" programs is, at least in theory, supposed to have some relationship to reality.  When a news network introduces a grown adult human as a political insider, that comes with the expectation that they must have some special, secret political insight which we mere mortals do not possess.  When someone is presented as an expert, the expectation is that they have studied their area of expertise so deeply that they and can impart to the audience insights which are available nowhere else.

And this was how ABC News packaged and presented Matthew Dowd.  As possessed of such deep and encyclopedic knowledge of politics and of such sterling character that he could be trusted to be that network's chief political analyst.   And in that role, what core, foundational ethos did Mr. Dowd 

espouse and defend with the single-mindedness of the Spartans defending the Hot Gates?

• Both Sides are equally bad.  Therefor...
• The K'rupt Duopoly is the Enemy.  Therefor..
• Disrupting the System by voting third party is our only salvation.  Also...
• Most voters who support Trump are decent, sensible, patriots.  Only a few around the fringe are wackos.  Just like the Left!! 

 And yet, in the blink of an eye...

This should be a titanic thing because it represents absolute annihilation of Matthew Dowd's ideological belief system right before his eyes, in public and in real-time -- a belief system that he had literally built his media brand on.  To be faced with the brute fact that you were not only utterly wrong about the one thing you had been hired to opine about based on your unique insider knowledge and expertise, but that some asshole Liberal nobody with a tiny blog in the middle of a cornfield was right all along?

Shattering, right?  

Apparently not.

For Dowd, there was no wailing or gnashing of teeth.  No regrets.  No confession.  No apologies.  No repentance.  No wandering in the wilderness.  Not even any passing acknowledgement that he had ever believed anything else.  Which for Catholic who throws bible verses up on social media almost as often as used to toss up Both Siderisms is more than passing strange.

Or maybe not so strange.

Because maybe Mr. Dowd's story doesn't begin in his miraculous, overnight 180-degree journalistic conversion over the past couple of years.

In fact, maybe it is worth pointing out that for a quarter of a century, Mr. Dowd's career has been a series of miraculous, overnight conversions from one thing to that thing's diametric opposite which, if such things interest you, you can read about in this article in Salon from 2007:

Matthew Dowd's not-so-miraculous conversion 

 

Is the former Bush pollster a true believer turned disillusioned critic, or was he an opportunist from the get-go? 

 

Spoiler:  He was an opportunist from the get-go.

A more mundane version of Dowd's story begins with a little-known pollster in a state capital, laboring for a political party headed for seemingly perpetual minority status. Attached to the conservative wing of the Texas Democrats, Dowd was a partner in the Austin-based Public Strategies P.R. firm. Along with one of his partners, media consultant Mark McKinnon, he seamlessly shifted into the presidential campaign of Gov. Bush.

Dowd has given a couple of accounts of this painless conversion, attributing it variously to the shining impression made by Bush and the persuasive skills of Rove, whom he came to know well in the hothouse atmosphere of Austin. McKinnon told his friends he wasn't a Republican, but a "Bush guy," while Dowd, for his part, simply left it at that he had become a "Bush Republican." Had they not jumped at the main chance that materialized, they would have been mired as provincial losers. Instead, they chose fame and fortune. Observers viewed their leap as symbolic of Bush's unusual capacity for bipartisanship.

And once he took the helm of Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, Dowd did not hesitate to help the campaign conflate 9/11 with Saddam Hussein, or the War on Terror generally with the Gay Agenda...because those "anger points" could be relied on to get Republican voters to the polls.

Dowd packaged his vicious tactics as nothing more than the application of basic advertising technique. His slicing and dicing of wedge issues was no such thing, he explained. He was, he said, just creating a new Republican "brand." After Rove executed Dowd's carefully calculated targeting to produce Bush's narrow victory in 2004, Dowd was triumphant. "Issues don't matter in presidential campaigns," he exulted in 2005, "it's your brand values that matter." For Dowd, facts didn't matter either, only "brand" identity.

But wouldn't you know it, once the Bush "brand" he worked so hard to create began to stink so hard that the mainstream media couldn't ignore it anymore, Mr. Dowd had yet another one of those miraculous, overnight conversions!  Like Jules in Pulp Fiction, Mr. Dowd was suddenly called by a higher power to leave life of a political hitman and walk the Earth like Cain in Kung Fu or some such.

"I'm a big believer that in part what we're called to do -- to me, by God; other people call it karma -- is to restore balance when things didn't turn out the way they should have." Following his inner map guides him away from world-weary vanity. "I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work," Dowd told the Times [in April of 2007].

However it turns out walking the Earth like Cain doesn't pay nearly as well as political consulting and punditing, so immediately after all of that transcendent musing about Africa and missionary work, Dowd picked up a lucrative consulting gig working for one of the worst families in American politics:

But Dowd neither detailed nor did the Times mention his consulting work in the campaign last year of Richard DeVos, billionaire heir of the Amway fortune, for governor of Michigan. DeVos is a zealous follower of and major donor to the most extreme organizations of the religious right. His campaign against incumbent Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm was marked by nasty ads falsely stating: "Under Governor Granholm's administration, you can stay on welfare as long as you want." These weren't a new paradigm but old racial code words. 

 

And immediately after that came the ABC News chief political analyst job which he slid into just as all the other Bush Regime Dead-Enders who had found themselves with permanent sinecures across the mainstream media began working to wipe the Age of Bush from the pages of history under an avalanche of Both Siderism.  And as long as Both Siderism was the undisputed coin of the mainstream media realm, Mr. Dowd worked his ass off to make himself into the King of Both Sides Do It.

Then -- thanks in no small measure to you lovely people who were able push back hard against the daily gaslighting madness and barbarity of the Trump Regime by turning #BothSidesDont from the motto of the Professional Left Podcast into a actual cause with actual teeth -- the wind gradually shifted and, here and there, Both Siderism started to fall out of favor.  

At which point, Matthew Dowd had another one of his miraculous, overnight conversions.  The King of Both Sides Do It is suddenly the King of Both Sides Don't!  And he is now free to expound at length about the evils of Both Siderism from the safety of little nest that his fellow Bush Regimes Dead-Enders have made for each other on the MSNBC network: a secure bunker where Mr. Dowd can be sure that none of his colleagues would ever be rude enough to bring up his past.

Except maybe now, just among us, we can stop pretending that these "conversions" are conversions at all.

These are merely an actor changing costumes.

And in his most recent costume change, Mr. Dowd has wiped off the ABC News greasepaint, grown a beard, thrown on a pair of Michael Stipes' glasses and, bingo, Bill the Butcher is now The Great Emancipator. 

Burn The Lifeboats