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The Pundit’s Fallacy

It’s been brought to my attention that despite my role in having coined the phrase Pundit’s Fallacy, I lack a canonical blog post on the subject that other people can link to.

So here it goes: The pundit’s fallacy is that belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively. So progressive populists think that Barack Obama would have higher approval ratings if he acted more like Ed Schultz while establishmentarian centrists think his ratings would go up if he acted more like David Broder. The truth, of course, is that he really needs to hew more closely to my preferences politics doesn’t work this way.

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