Here is their primary criticism:
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
What does that even mean? Josh Marshall:
Or to be more specific, Obama’s winning but not with the best votes. I mean really, if you can’t win with a broad cross-section of white people, can you really be said to represent the country? Really.
Brad DeLong invokes the 3/5ths rule: If elected by a majority who is not old white rich men, then it's only 3/5ths of a real majority.
It hasn't escaped me that Allen and VandeHei are older white men, so maybe they're just needing to feel relevant again.
Still, it's a bizarre thing to say, right?
Well, maybe not as bizarre as you might think. Go read this splendid long read by Alex Pareene on The Baffler about The Politico and other Villagers. It's quite an article, but you won't regret spending the time. Here's a taste.
It’s bracing to consider how many successful Web-baiting careers at Politico might be cut short if reporters there ever bothered to read Dreams from My Father. Fortunately, though, there’s little chance that such a reckoning with the truth will ever occur, thanks to the paper’s endlessly excitable business model, which conflates the work of journalism with an amnesiac’s bad acid trip. Much of Politico’s published output seems deliberately engineered to exasperate high-minded liberals who consider journalism an act of public service.
