Pundit Boxscore for Tuesday 28 December 2004

FAVORITES: Since I spend most of the time here criticizing the usual suspects for excessive partisanship, it's useful to take a break once in a while and offer praise for columnists whom I admire for their independence. In a recent e-mail, Peggy Kaplan, who writes the blog what if?, had this to say:

I've found few issues of significance in my lifetime that didn't have shades of gray and aspects that raised difficult questions. The fair and balanced columnists do write about these shades ... and, in my opinion, it ultimately serves to bolster their opinions, because the reader has the feeling that they are fair and they do question everything.

I think that columnists such as David Broder and Robert Samuelson hold mostly centrist views, so they naturally end up with very low partisanship scores. I admire a columnist like Richard Cohen, who can be a strident liberal critic of Republicans, yet still have the independence to hammer Michael Moore and graciously praise Ronald Reagan. Also on the left, both Clarence Page and William Raspberry are willing to grapple with difficult issues, taking seriously all sides of an argument.

On the right, Jeff Jacoby is a principled conservative, who doesn't hesitate to criticize "the most bloated budget ever", or to single out Russell Feingold for praise. In his first full year at The New York Times, David Brooks has been independent and consistently thought-provoking.