rolling stone

David Brooks argued the other day that Stanley McChrystal's now-famous comments should have never been made public. Brooks laments the inability of today's elite figures to "kvetch," to blow off some steam with underlings in response to their tough lives.

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

I understand Brooks's argument here. And I do think "gotcha journalism" is a major fault of today's politics, dissuading many an ideal public servant from running for office or even getting involved.

However, Brooks' line of thinking in this context is problematic. First, it is a symptom of another large problem with our politics: the media's cozy relationship with those in office. As Andrew Sullivan wrote this week (as well as Frank Rich today), it's problematic we did not hear more about McChrystal sooner. Though Brooks tries to get away with painting McChrystal as an angel who enjoyed great relations with the White House, that's not the case. And despite McChrystal's penchant for risky behavior, Obama continued to provide him with all he could want.

That leads me to the second problem with Brooks' column. The public has a right to know when a general jeopardizes a mission funded by their tax dollars, especially a mission that is a part of the longest war in this country's history. This wasn't run of the mill complaining, either. McChrystal again challenged the authority of the President's administration, and he did so with considerable audacity.

Brooks seems to be doing the compartmentalizing Harry Boyte, from yesterday's post, rejects. Brooks assumes that because we're all fallible as humans, we all should be given time to indulge our inner monster, to spew a few choice words to no particular audience. Unfortunately, we don't live in that vacuum. Everything is political, whether we like it or not.

But in this particular situation, Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter who embarrassed the traditional media, did the right thing. McChrystal's comments illustrated a pattern of behavior that undermined civilian authority over the United States military. Hastings did not make it impossible for Obama to retain his general, as Brooks argues; McChrystal did it himself.

Reading all the youth vote press in the last week, one thing is abundantly clear - the punditry is now fully on board the youth vote wagon. When James Carville goes from saying this:

Show me a candidate who depends on the youth vote and I'll show you a loser.

To this:

Exit polling indicates that Mr Obama won two-thirds of those voting under 30 years old against 32 per cent for John McCain. Compare that with a 54-45 margin for John Kerry in 2004 and a 48-46 margin for Al Gore in 2000. Consider this: if young people had voted for Democrats at about the same proportion of the overall electorate (52-46) as they had voted as recently as 2000 for Mr Gore and for many cycles prior, Mr Obama would not have won North Carolina or Indiana. Young voters also provided the margin of victory in key battleground states such as Florida, Virginia and Ohio. The youth vote expanded the map for Mr Obama; it put him over the top in states not won by Democrats in decades.

Something has clearly changed.

The latest in this steady stream of pundits now cheer-leading the youth vote comes from this interview in Rolling Stone between Jann Wenner, David Gergen and Peter Hart:

Let's talk about a couple of those constituencies. The youth vote — what role did it play? Was it big enough to really make a difference?
HART: It made a huge difference. Remember: When we talk about the youth vote, we're talking about all 50 states. It's not like the evangelical vote or an ethnic group that is located in one particular area. Youth voters — coast to coast, border to border — turned to Obama in numbers that are just hard to fathom. They were drawn to him from day one, and it was a connection that was as psychological as it was issue-driven. This is somebody who spoke their language, who understood the times and who provided a direction that they wanted to see the country go in. Gore carried young voters by two points. Kerry carried them by about nine points. Obama carried them by 34 points.

GERGEN: The emergence of this millennial generation as a force in American politics is going to be one of the biggest stories in the country over the next 20 years or so. We know from past history that when young people vote for one party a couple of times, they tend to vote for that party during their adult lifetimes in disproportionate numbers. We last saw this with Ronald Reagan, who attracted an unusual number of young people. But the rising generation of millennials is bigger than what has come before. They are even bigger than the baby-boom population, and they are much more progressive and diverse. Forty percent of millennials are minorities. They look past gender and race in ways that baby boomers do not. They embrace diversity, whereas older Americans tend to be wary or even scared of it. So this is an enormous potential asset for Democrats. We talked all along about whether Barack being black would drive away voters. Among the millennials, the fact that he was black attracted voters.

The whole interview is quite good. Gergen and Hart know their stuff and give a good overview of the youth vote, technology, and Obama's new winning coalition. But these quotes in particular could have been ripped right from the partisan youth vote coalition's talking points. A year ago, it's hard to imagine that the post-election youth vote narrative would be so favorable. You really can't complain. Except I'm me, so I will complain.

The one thing that's missing in this picture is us - the young people. It's great that the punditocracy is on board and preaching the youth vote, but there are precious few of us on TV or in some of these big stories talking about the youth vote and how we got from 2000's near tie among youth to last week's landslide. If I had my druthers, we'd be out there more telling our story rather than the pundits, many of whom probably doubted the youth vote right up until the polls closed.