Mid-Year Observations
A few observations at the halfway point of 2007:
- Paul Krugman is holding his lead in the Democratic partisanship rankings, and Frank Rich has passed Joe Conason for second place. Mr. Conason’s ranking dropped in June when he wrote a very strong crossover column in Salon criticizing Hillary Clinton.
- Ann Coulter is again running away with the Republican partisanship title, despite a couple of crossover columns criticizing the Bush administration on immigration. Her 60-1 ratio of negative (299) to positive (5) Democratic references is the highest that it has been since her 2004 record of 70-1.
- Frank Rich’s March prediction of a Scooter Libby pardon was mostly vindicated by President Bush’s commutation of Libby’s prison sentence.
- The name of Marc Rich has been coming up frequently as a comparison to the Scooter Libby commutation, so I was curious if Paul Krugman would mention it. One of the reasons that Mr. Krugman has been able to achieve such high partisanship scores is his meticulous avoidance of Democratic scandals — he has not mentioned the name of Marc Rich in any of his more than 600 NYT columns since the beginning of 2000. True to form, he wrote about the Libby case this past week without mentioning Marc Rich, unlike fellow Times pundits Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. On the other hand, E.J. Dionne also discussed the commutation without mentioning Marc Rich.
Finally, congratulations to Joe Conason for the two new additions to his family.
