Pundit Boxscore for Tuesday 28 October 2003

HOW PARTISAN IS ROBERT SCHEER? I said at the sixth month mark that I was reserving judgment on whether Robert Scheer's columns were extremely partisan or not, because to that point he had written almost exclusively about one subject, the war in Iraq (same for Peggy Noonan). It's certainly true that one could take a strongly pro- or anti-war position based on sincere beliefs, and that the resulting partisanship score could be misleadingly high -- an artifact really, of the small sample size. In recent months, Mr. Scheer has sometimes turned his attention to other topics, most often to the California recall election. Although he was strongly critical of Arnold Schwarzenegger and supportive of Cruz Bustamante, those non-Iraq columns provide some evidence that Mr. Scheer's writing is guided more by liberal ideology than by Democratic partisanship. Mr. Scheer has dished out genuine praise of both Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower, and most notably has sharply criticized the Democratic California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, for his support of Schwarzenegger:

In perhaps the most bizarre turn yet in California's season of political madness, the state's highest law enforcement official has said, in effect, that allegations of sexual harassment and even possible assault of women do not constitute serious offenses if perpetrated by his "good friend" Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As a result, his score has now dropped five points lower than Paul Krugman's. His ratio of 2-to-1 positive-to-negative references to his own party contrasts with the 6-1 ratio of Mr. Krugman and the 10-1 ratio of Ann Coulter. While Robert Scheer is certainly a partisan Democrat, he has shown at least an occasional willingness to hold his own party accountable for its shortcomings which separates him from the two titans of partisanship who precede him in the rankings.