Bai's piece delves into the numbers but seems oddly disconnected from what the American People are feeling. Fully 75% of the country thinks we are on the wrong track.
Matt Bai can't seem to get his head around what Al Gore has been talking about and what John Edwards is saying:
When I saw him for the first time since his 2004 presidential campaign, at a Chapel Hill cafe in January 2006, he seemed to me a changed man — liberated, self-assured, a little defiant.
“I saw the difference in the way people responded to me when I was talking from here,” he told me that day, patting his heart, “and not from here.” He raised a finger to his head. “Just being myself and standing up for what I believe, and not being coached and not being consulted, is what it’s all about.” He derided all the “phoniness” in Washington and talked about the scores of poor neighborhoods he had been visiting on his own. “With just a few breaks the other way, I would be sitting where these people are right now,” he told me. “I know it sounds corny, but when I can’t sleep at night, I get these pictures in my head of all the people I’ve met. I wonder what more I should be doing.”
The cynical Beltway mentality Bai seems to exhibit is symptomatic of all of the Washington Elite. Don't get me wrong. Bai has written an informed piece and it will take a careful reading to absorb some of the arguments (and yes, he is making arguments in this piece, though often putting the arguments in the mouths of those he quotes) he makes. But what comes through to me is a writer so utterly detached and separated from what America outside the Beltway is feeling that his article falls quite flat to me.
I want to read it more carefully because I am trying to get a real handle on what Edwards is about now. But, so far, I find that the attitude of Matt Bai is standing in the way. I will perservere nonetheless - because it seems an important article about a leading Presidential candidate that discusses important issues.
And in today's world of political reporting, that is a breath of fresh air.