The New York Daily News still occupies a key place in New York political and media circles, even if its old core base of outer borough white ethnic types has died out: for one, it's got whatever "center" there is, between Murdoch's vanity publication on the wacky right, and the staid, liberal New York Times. For another, it's the voicebox of Mort Zuckerman, a hawkish media mogul B-lister.
The News suffers from an acute identity problem, a true personality crisis. The Archie Bunker base in New York has either died or moved away and the real working-class New Yorker is likely to be black or Hispanic or Asian and quite often, born someplace else. The News is out of touch with this growing, churning middle class economic powerhouse - a look at its opinion pages is a window into just how clueless the paper is. The News doesn't get this new middle class, and its lead opinion voice - Pulitzer winner Michael Goodwin - is cartoonishly out of kilter, pitching his faux dese, dems, and dose "common man" pablum to mere ghosts in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Back in November, Goodwin's reaction to the Democrats' sweep was to throw out a hackneyed "Mommy Party" column in the spirit of the noted anti-feminist Maureen Dowd.
Republicans, with their macho men and muscular policy prescriptions,
are in decline because they are out of answers. Dems are getting better
at seizing their opportunities, and doing it with women playing a
leading role.
Put another way, Mommy is taking over because Daddy screwed up.
This is blatant sexism; can Goodwin actually walk around this town in public after writing something like that? To put it another way, what's he smoking? New York's working class is filled with ambitious women; its professional class shows more and more numerical equality between the sexes each year. And Goodwin acts like an old, doddering man from another century with his "mommy class" tripe.
Then today, Goodwin loads his Obama-versus-Clinton column with a scat-like riff loaded with anti-woman downbeats.
He's everything she's not. He's warm, she's cold. He's a great speaker,
even off-the-cuff. She's usually wooden and sticks to the calculated
message. He's the fresh-faced outsider. She's the ultimate insider. He
talks about uniting America across racial and political lines. She's a
born-to-divide partisan. Her sense of inevitability makes you tired,
Obama's charisma makes you pay attention.
Cold. Wooden. Calculating (and we know what that usually modifies, don't we?). Born-to-divide partisan. She makes us tired - you know who we are: blue-collar, outer-borough he-men, two-fisted drinkers down at the corner bar, at Archie's Place. That kind of us. She wears us out, because she's a woman and we don't want to hear a woman talk. Who does, you know?
No, I don't know. Goodwin is writing for some tiny slice of old male-dominated New York; he's incredibly out of touch and it rankles. Senator Clinton, to Goodwin, has no authenticity - whereas all her male counterparts don't get the same challenge at the gate, despite being career politicians. He even doubts her religion:
She famously wore a Christian cross around her neck, which was the equivalent of a flashing neon light that shouted “CENTRIST.”
When's the last time Michael Goodwin doubted the religious beliefs of a prominent male politician. Here's a gentle hint: never.
Then there's Iraq. It's obscene, frankly, that Mike Goodwin is battering Senator Clinton for her war vote when he wrote - just last summer - the following about the Connecticut Democratic primary:
So now that the wackadoo wing of the party has a bloody scalp, what are
they going to do with it? Wave it at Islamic terrorists in Iraq and
Lebanon and Afghanistan and Indonesia and Great Britain and Spain and
Israel and New York and declare peace? That will work for sure. They
better also wear armor and duck.
Lieberman is the first casualty of the war against the war on terror.
If last night's results are a window on the party's tilt, then a huge
slice of the Democratic party is ready to sit out the war to protect
America. God help us if the Republicans also get the wobblies. Let's
hope the Connecticut Condition isn't contagious. And let's hope last
night's decision is overturned.
Yeah, the wackadoo wing, Goodwin. Nice perspective. (He means us, by the way - you and me). And oh yeah, we're in a world war:
World War III has begun.
It's not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the
Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first
bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in
the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to
be heading there. The expanding hostilities mean it's time to give this
conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big
picture.
The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.
Within the course of half a year, Goodwin lambasts the Democrats for being weak on the war - "Democratic Party leaders want to pretend we can declare peace and everything will be fine" - and smacks Senator Clinton for being too hawkish!
Then again, Goodwin has always had it in for the Clintons. He demands absolute leaders, who don't employ nuance in their policies (we corner bar New Yawkas really love guys like George Bush - real men). This is what Goodwin wrote in 2004, defending the Bush Administration and attempting to relegate Bill Clinton to history's scrapheap in this, our new post-9/11 world:
American politics, like everything else, changed on 9/11. As the last
election proved, the game is no longer about traditional standards of
interest groups and issue positions. Biography, charisma and the polish of education matter far less than they did just four years ago.
The new gold standard is at once more elusive and more precise. For
every would-be leader, the test is this: Are you rock-solid? Those who
cannot say yes, and convince voters, need not apply. Weakness,
waffling, nuance, process - they're luxuries from a bygone era.
And for God's sake, no more parsing and blurring. It's a gut-check
world now, and half-truths are no longer half true. They're damnable
lies.
Bubba had his run. His time, and times, have passed. He isn't ready to accept that, but we must. The future demands it.
Yeah, charisma and charm don't matter anymore to Michael Goodwin - until they're exhibited by someone running against Hillary Clinton. Then they're worth a column. Because we can't have that woman in the lead, she talks too much, she's calculating (because women, you know, just are), and we don't want a mommy party. Not down at the corner bar. Not at the Daily News. Not in a New York that went away 30 years ago - the New York that Michael Goodwin and the Daily News still believe exists. Check those circulation numbers, and get back to me on that.
UPDATE: Good arguments in comments, where I admit I've been lying in the weeds on this for awhile - and Jim Wolcott also riffs on Goodwin:
Now that Zev Chafets has vacated the paper and A. M. Rosenthal has
departed the planet, Goodwin, never the victim of an original thought,
is the News's foremost purveyor of the painfully obvious and invariably
incorrect. Column after column, he churns out consensus opinion at its
most pernicious, cobwebbed, creaky, and self-satisfied. Sexism aside
(though sexism has etched a reactionary smirk into his every banality
about the Mommy Party and its mommy dearest, Hillary Clinton), it is
particularly galling for Goodwin to chide Hillary for voicing "tired
mush" vis a vis American involvement in Iraq. For years Goodwin, like
the Daily News's editorial page, stood stalwart behind George Bush and
mocked liberals and Democrats for being defeatist, myopic about the
threat of Terrorism, politically emasculated; he ladled out his own
mushy words of support as the bad news accumulated; then when the
failure in Iraq became so unignorable that Goodwin himself slowly,
grudingly gravitated to the point of view some of us had all along, he
couldn't lay his Liebermanism aside, no, he saw fit to demand that
everyone draw a shining arrow indicating which direction the U.S.
should take to extricate itself from the mire. Just so he could find it
insufficient.
Steve Gilliard follows Wolcott's downbeat, with his own take on the Daily News:
The News got a wake up call in the winter of
2005 during the Transit Strike. While White New York, now the minority,
was engraged, the rest of New York was supportive of the union. Which
shocked people. The borderline racist comments in the News started to
backfire when someone realized, as anyone looking around the streets
would, that the people who paid their bills were black and Latino.
When they depicted TWU leader Roger Toussaint as a caged animal, they crossed a line.
The
News is likely to increase their transition from the dead world of
Archie Bunker as they realize their economic survival depends on it.
Mort Zuckerman is unlikely to make such changes until he gets smacked
in the face.
The News was once the right wing paper and the Post
the left. Until 1977, when Rupert Murdoch bought it. Suddenly, the News
started tacking left slowly. But the paper, like a lot of institutions,
are slow to realize that New York has changed and the people who run it
are no longer the white middle class of the boroughs.
The Academy Awards are more about celebrity than film-making these days, but they do force the collectuve consumer consciousness to focus once a year on the "best" of the movie business. Best, of course, in a subjective, in-the-monent manner. Best in terms of - often - of popularity, and politics, and box office. Fresh off our wild night covering the Grammys, the 
Any baseball fan who actually believes in "Yankee tradition" after the Bloomberg administration's vacant deal to tear down Yankee Stadium and construct a shoddy replica across the way in Macombs Dam Park is a fool. There is no Yankee tradition in Macombs Dam Park. When the Yankees move into their new stadium in 2009, they will abandon the field of history forever.