When this department last looked in upon Jonathan Tasini, he had just lost a Democratic Primary campaign for US Senate run on the premise that Hillary Clinton was insufficiently liberal (and that Ned Lamont was barely an improvement). As I’d predicted back then, the punch line of his joke of a crusade was that Tasini ended up getting most of his votes from right wing reactionaries.
Now, with Easter upon us, Tasini has decided it is time to resurrect himself–this time as a hard as nails political pragmatist.
Today, in a column called “Bill, It’s Over,” Tasini essentially tells Mike Bloomberg’s one serious contender not to bother: “I'm not sure that anyone has told NY Comptroller Bill Thompson yet but his race for mayor is over…effectively….Thompson may still run (seems like Anthony Weiner has one foot out of the race already) but I would say that his speechwriter can now spend a very relaxing few months drafting the concession speech.”The appearance of such self-fulfilling conventional wisdom on the pages of our mainstream dailies, is only to be expected in a town where even the pretense of objectivity has become a joke, and the wishful thinking of the publishers extends from the editorial pages to op-eds, commentaries and the “news” itself. In this manner, the Post has almost become the best paper in town, as it wears its pretenses so lightly it is almost winking at you–would be that the others were so honest.
As a liberal/centrist pragmatist, I’ve often been a critic of the hard left, but there’s something truly pathetic when an ideologue as pure as Tasini refuses to stand up on behalf of a crusade against this sort of imposed consensus and instead decides to go with the flow. Is this because Thompson is not a left purist, but rather a pragmatic policy wonk?
At any rate, I’m afraid we must take Tasini’s thoughts seriously. As vacuous as is his reflexive embrace of the catechism of the politically correct, we must defer to Tasini in his one area of expertise.
He is surely New York’s leading authority on being a loser.