John Tierney’s Tuesday column began innocently enough. He tasted
the usual after-election bipartisanship talk and sent it back to
the kitchen.
This wasn’t what Americans ordered, Tierney wrote in his usual
slot on the New York Times op-ed page. They had asked for
gridlock. Democrats “offered no bold new ideas, and they were
rewarded with victory.” Their job now was to “mop up the messes
made by Republicans, but that’s it.”
On the domestic front, he explained, the thing voters cared
about most was charges of corruption. So: Democrats should do less
to invite those charges, ban earmarks, pass fewer laws, avoid
giving the voters indigestion. After all, the most popular and
effective bill in the last decade was welfare reform, which had
“essentially repealed the damage of the do-something Congresses of
the 1960s and 1970s.”
But then came the shocker. Whatever this new Congress decides to
do, Tierney wrote, “I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my
last column on the Op-Ed page.” He explained, “[O]ne election cycle
[in D.C.] is enough.” He would be decamping to New York to write
for the paper’s science pages.
I don’t know why Tierney did this, but the fact that I couldn’t
read his farewell on the Times website can’t have helped.
It’s also possible that the handover of the op-ed page from Gail
Collins to Andrew Rosenthal had something to do with it.
We know this much: Tierney rose to the plum position of op-ed
columnist right about the same time the Times decided to
charge non-subscribers $49.95 a year to read its columnists,
through a program called TimesSelect. As part of that deal, the
Newspaper of Record forbade local newspapers that carry
Times columnists from running them online.
The decision was a disaster for the columnists. It reduced their
reach and readership. The op-ed page had generated more buzz than
an old radio in an electrical storm. In the late '90s, I could
rarely go a week without hearing what Maureen Dowd had to say.
Princeton economist Paul Krugman’s deranged fulminations against
President Bush had real effect — until they were safely locked
away in the pay-to-read section.
Times columnists dealt with their newfound obscurity in
various ways. Book leave became more frequent. Several columnists
— including the valley girl-sounding Dowd — started doing more
television chat shows to get attention.
But Tierney wasn’t right for television. He’s quiet and doesn’t
speak in slogans, and he’s not a cheerleader for either party.
Instead, he just wrote.
Tierney’s contrarianism, libertarianism, and good humor made him
my favorite voice on the Times op-ed page. I didn’t
subscribe to TimesSelect but if I saw the Tuesday or Saturday
editions of the paper, I’d often pick them up to see what he had to
say.
Agree or disagree with him, you had to at least respect a
columnist who managed to say the things that he did on an op-ed
page that was obsessed with respectability. To wit:
* In the middle of the Social Security debate, Tierney wondered
why our new long-lived old folks had to retire so damn early.
* He defended polygamy as a vehicle for female progress.
* He looked at the red state, blue state divide by asking what
secession would look like.
* He came up with a solution for the Mark Foley scandal: Abolish
the page program.
* He proposed “no-sluts-allowed” Halloween parties to correct
the “market failure” of “Slutoween.”
* He weighed into the Borat controversy by reminding
readers that the comedian’s supposedly racist, sexist, misogynist
Middle American marks had behaved decently toward a weird
foreigner.
Not everybody liked Tierney’s column. A few installments led to
bags of hate mail from the op-ed page’s core group of
left-of-center readers, and some Republicans groused that he wasn’t
a partisan.
Earlier this year, the New Republic published an
essay by Noam Scheiber arguing that Tierney was
“boring,” because he didn’t write about the sort of things the
author wanted him to write about — health care and Iraq — and
because he was skeptical of most projects that government
undertakes.
The criticism was not entirely accurate. Tierney wrote a number
of columns about Iraq and he actually reported from the country
before he came to the op-ed page. He brought to light the high incidence of cousin
marriage in Iraq and the fact that intense loyalties to kith and
clan would make forming a government difficult.
But leave Iraq aside for a moment. Scheiber’s complaint was that
Tierney didn’t write on the subjects that the New Republic
would like to talk about and he has a different set of ideas than
most of the folks in the press. After consulting several
dictionaries about this, I’m still having a hard time understanding
how that makes Tierney the boring one.
Jeremy Lott is the Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow
at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of In Defense of Hypocrisy.
