On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, Zeleny reported that Indiana governor Mitch Daniels will not be running for president. According to Daniels, the idea was vetoed by his wife and by the couple’s four daughters.
Eventually, Zeleny provided a bit of context. He helped us see how this family’s story had been misreported—“in Indiana,” that is:
ZELENY (5/24/11): The Daniels family saw a glimpse of the spotlight when Cheri Daniels agreed to make a rare public speech at the spring dinner of the Indiana Republican Party. Her appearance touched off stories about the couple's divorce in 1993 and Mrs. Daniels's decision to move briefly to California with another man, whom she married in 1995. Two years later, she remarried Mr. Daniels.
In Indiana, Mr. Daniels has been portrayed as the father who raised his four daughters when Mrs. Daniels moved away. A review of the divorce file in Boone County Court showed that Mrs. Daniels tried to take her daughters, 7 to 13 at the time, to California, but that Mr. Daniels blocked her effort with an emergency appeal to the court.
He also tried to block her effort to buy a house, court records show, but a judge overruled his request. She moved back to Indianapolis and had joint custody of the children until the couple remarried.
In a statement on Sunday to The Indianapolis Star, Mr. Daniels sought to clarify that episode, saying they had raised the children together. ''The notion that Cheri ever did or would abandon her girls or parental duty is the reverse of the truth and absurd to anyone who knows her,'' he said.
This story has been wrongly portrayed “in Indiana”—or so it seemed from Zeleny’s account. In fact, Cheri Daniels only “moved briefly” to California when she divorced her husband in the early 1990s; she soon moved back to Indianapolis and helped him raise their girls. Topping off his reappraisal, Zeleny quoted Daniels defending his wife. The notion that she would abandon her girls is the “reverse of the truth,” he had said.
Reading Zeleny, you would have thought that this story was bungled by journalists “in Indiana.” But where did many people get the impression that Cheri Daniels abandoned the kids, apparently for three years? Uh-oh! Many people got that impression in a May 12 report by Jeff Zeleny! On that day, Zeleny had played Church Lady on the front page of this same New York Times.
Here’s how Zeleny told the story, all of thirteen days ago. Granted, the Timesman was “in Indiana” when he filed his report:
ZELENY (5/12/11): While much is known about Mr. Daniels in Republican circles, where he is viewed as a fiscally focused, budget-cutting, pragmatic-thinking conservative, there is one period of his life that has remained almost entirely private—until now.
He has been married twice—to the same wife.
Should he run, that chapter in his life would no doubt be picked over in public and become a part of the personal narrative that springs up around any serious candidate: in this case a three-year gap in their marriage in the 1990s, when she filed for divorce, moved to California with a new husband and left Mr. Daniels to raise their four daughters, then ages 8 to 14. She later returned and remarried him.
He has discussed it only once publicly, telling The Indianapolis Star in 2004: ''If you like happy endings, you'll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems.''
Should Daniels run, this story “would no doubt be picked over in public,” Zeleny wrote, as he himself picked it over in public. That said, let’s review a contradiction:
“In Indiana, Mr. Daniels has been portrayed as the father who raised his four daughters when Mrs. Daniels moved away.” So clucked Zeleny, yesterday morning. He forgot to add a basic fact—that’s the way he himself told the story, just twelve days before!
But so it goes when the nation’s Church Ladies seize control of a White House campaign. The ladies have been clucking hard in recent weeks about the sins of the vile Cheri, who even carries a Frenchified name, a name which reeks of sweet perfume. Only naturally, Michelle Cottle has been leading the way, continuing her long campaign to succeed Cokie Roberts as establishment Washington’s official ranking Church Lady. But Church Ladies come in both genders these days—and they seem to be a bit slow to admit their own mistakes.
Yesterday, we uttered low mordant chuckles as we reviewed the way Zeleny adjusted his copy from two weeks before. But that’s how the Church Ladies play.
The Church Ladies love to stick their long noses into other folks’ underwear drawers. Beyond that, they love to make a campaign so dumb, so fatuous, so inane, that even theyvery poorly for liberals and Dems in the past several decades. But we liberals now seem to love the dumbness too, as we saw in yesterday’s Salon, when Justin Elliott authored this long, dumb report about Newt Gingrich’s jewels. can find it intriguing. This low-IQ system has worked
The dumbness of our political culture is a thing to behold—and a threat to the nation. That cultural dumbness got Clinton impeached; it then sent George Bush to the White House. But as pseudo-liberals have emerged from the woods in the wake of that latter disaster, we too have developed an obvious taste for The Dumb. Our editors seem to think that their liberal readers are dumb, and they rush to serve them piffle. This system will never work well for our side, but it feels very good going down.
Our political culture swims in The Dumb; The Dumb is now our cultural ruler. On any given Sunday, this fact becomes abundantly clear in the Washington Post’s Outlook section. This past Sunday, the section led with a tribute to The Dumb, as a silly TV producer compared the various Republican hopefuls to a long list of American sitcoms. But The Dumb appeared all through the high-profile section, as is true many weeks.
Any given Sunday, The Dumb rules the Post. This culture works poorly for progressive interests—and for America’s future.
Coming: Long on sitcoms, Bok on Stewart, and other great gifts to The Dumb
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