What is it with Brad DeLong and Bill Greider? A couple of years so ago, DeLong let loose with a screed against Greider and David Stockman—recall it was Greider the journalist who outed Stockman the political hack good man in a bad trade who tried to save us from the evils of the Reagan administration. I thought then that the bile against Greider was at least unwarranted and more generally, downright bewildering (link).
Today for no very convincing reason, DeLong hauled out the same fiery hairball and hurled it again (link). I remain unpersuaded, and said so in the DeLong comments, with a link to my earlier piece. A short time later, “Brad” (sic?) popped up with a comment on the two-year-old thread:
Be assured that my dislike for Greider is small potatoes relative to what the people who worked for him when he was Assistant Managing Editor of the *Post* say when they let their hair down...
Hah? What is this all about? And what does Brad (sic) think he is telling us? Reporters didn’t like their editor? Given DeLong’s ceaseless harping about the evils of journalism in general and the Post in particular, how could anyone possibly take seriously the opinion of any Post journalist about his (her) editor? Or must we recognize that this is, in the last analysis, a matter of personal animus—the kind of personal feud which, practically speaking, shouldn’t be of any interest to the rest of us anyway?
And tedious fn: I don’t know who DeLong knew/knows at the Post, but I knew/know a scattering of these guys, and from what I hear, the tweendecks folks had a high opinion of Greider and were sorry to see him go.
Another tedious fn.: In my original post, I snidely cracked that the book was being remaindered at $1.96. As of this morning, at Amazon it was down to a penny.
One more: Aa the risk of extending this interminably, I have to say I have never been that crazy about Greider’s economic analysis—on the whole, I like DeLong’s better. But as an observer/psychologist, I think Greider has no peer. His profile of George McGovern, reprinted (I think) in the Library of America collection of Vietnam-era journalism (to take just one example) is a masterpiece of shrewd observation. So also the Stockman piece. I think it retains whatever value it has (a penny?) more for its description of Stockman than for whatever, in particular, it says about tax-and-spend.
2 comments:
As I said, Greider writes beautifully...
Put yourself back in 1981, when all my teachers were fighting as hard as they could against the Reagan deficit idiocy, and read the *Post's* respectful coverage of everything Stockman said on A1 while thinking about what Greider knew at the time about what Stockman thought.
According to Greider, he could have burned Stockman at any time--there was no confidentiality agreement. Yet he waited to burn him until the military spending increases and the tax cuts had been signed into law--made a better story that way, and a bigger splash...
i was working on the hill for Carl Perkins, chair of Ed and Labor, when greider was asst me at the post, and i knew and dealt with a few reporters who worked with greider. dont recall one every saying a bad word about greider.
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