Why America's Hottest Young Political Writer Fails

What is the point of Matt Taibbi? I'm asking this earnestly, not in snark. Rolling Stone's youthful national-affairs columnist is one of the hot political writers of the season, frequently described as a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson. He even won the National Magazine Award for columns and commentary this year.

I find that puzzling. Taibbi's writing, to my taste, does the opposite of what good political commentary ought to do: persuade through original arguments. His rhetorical style consists of little more than in-your-face vulgarity, hyperbole and cliché. Read his latest column, on Sarah Palin, if you don't believe me. (It's not on Rolling Stone's website yet, thanks to that magazine's backward approach to the internet, but you can find it here.)

Reporting from the convention, Taibbi sets the scene by describing the "four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia" and "their turkey-necked female companions." (The resort to physiognomy is classic Taibbi, by the way -- greedy politicians are always fat, and hypocrites are always ugly. Even Palin, an actual beauty pageant winner, merely has "just enough looks," according to Taibbi.) Palin, we're told, is a "provincial tyrant." Her "meanness" is "of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck." She is "a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne." (Certainly, two-bit caricature is something Taibbi knows about.) And she was chosen, he says, in the hope that

John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin' picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because...that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Oh, yeah, and he also compares Republicans to Nazis ("It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag").

What's he trying to accomplish here? If his language or imagery were a little fresher, his towering contempt for average Americans and their ways might at least be humorous. But Doritos and double chins? Not exactly virgin comic territory. Yet as a serious bit of commentary, it fails utterly: No attempt whatsoever is made to understand his subject except in terms of the broadest stereotypes. I can't imagine Taibbi's going to win over any wavering swing voters by insulting them and the culture they inhabit.

The only real achievement of writing like this is to encourage already like-minded readers to congratulate themselves on their superior tastes and disdain for the other side. Which is fine, I guess, if not the sort of thing you give out awards for. But someone should tell Taibbi that it's the predictable disgust of people like him that make the culture-war posturing of people like Sarah Palin so resonant with the many, many folks who like pick-up trucks and plasma TVs and aren't ashamed of it.

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