Matt Bai

Times Watch Quotes of Note: Beware the 'Symbolic Phallus' of Summer Movies
By Clay Waters | May 13, 2011 | 2:29 PM EDT

Newt Gingrich: He’s No Mario Cuomo

"Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking? That’s the question a lot of political handicappers are asking now that Newt, as he is universally known in Washington, has decided to enter the 2012 campaign, with an announcement expected on Wednesday. Until recently, most of my colleagues assumed that the former speaker of the House, who flirted with running four years ago, was merely doing the same thing now, just to stay in the news. I mean, let’s be unsparing about this: Mr. Gingrich has never been elected to anything outside his old Congressional district in Georgia." – Political writer Matt Bai on former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, May 11.

vs.

 

"If you were a kid in the Northeast during the 1980s, as I was, there is something awesome -- in the literal sense -- about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo, even if he now misplaces names and occasionally grasps for the point of an anecdote that has fluttered just out of reach. He was, at that time, the anti-Reagan, a powerful and resonant voice of dissent in the age of "Top Gun" and Alex P. Keaton. Cuomo, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were the three titans of the day who seemed to possess the defiance needed to rescue liberalism from obsolescence." – Bai in an April 10 Sunday Magazine profile of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

The NYT's Matt Bai on Newt Gingrich: He's No Mario Cuomo
By Clay Waters | May 11, 2011 | 2:40 PM EDT

Newt Gingrich: He’s no Mario Cuomo.

New York Times political writer Matt Bai’s "Political Memo" Wednesday was pretty hostile to the battle-scared Republican leader considering a 2012 run for president: "Gingrich’s Run Reflects His Sense of History." Bai led off by asking "Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?" given that he "has never been elected to anything outside his old Congressional district in Georgia." (And, by the way, rose to Speaker of the House.)

But back on April 10 Bai confessed to being awestruck with his proximity to a liberal lion, former New York Gov. Cuomo: "...there is something awesome - in the literal sense - about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo."

Judging from his opening lines Wednesday, Bai was not nearly as impressed with the conservative Newt.

Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?

MRC’s Notable Quotables: Evil Republicans Making War on the Poor
By Rich Noyes | April 18, 2011 | 2:07 PM EDT

This week’s edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is chock full of liberal media quotes showing reporters’ slanted approach to the tax and budget issues now at center stage. In fact, there’s so much bad material, we had to add an extra page to our usually three-page newsletter (you can view/download the PDF here).

The whole issue is up over at www.MRC.org. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the worst quotes (including two video clips), all collected in the last couple of weeks:

New York Times Reporter Matt Bai: 'Something Awesome' About Sitting Next to Liberal Titan Mario Cuomo
By Clay Waters | April 12, 2011 | 12:48 PM EDT

Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, celebrated the “grace and gravitas” of former New York State governor and perpetual Democratic presidential hopeful Mario Cuomo, “Papa Doesn’t Preach – Mario Cuomo would be a perfect elder statesman, if only his son’s generation wanted one.”

Bai talked to the elder Cuomo, whose son Andrew is governor of New York, at his office at a Midtown law firm. The profile begins with Cuomo in charmlessly pedantic mode, with a lecture on the precise meaning of the word “proud.” Bai admired him as one of the liberal “titans of the day.”

If you were a kid in the Northeast during the 1980s, as I was, there is something awesome -- in the literal sense -- about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo, even if he now misplaces names and occasionally grasps for the point of an anecdote that has fluttered just out of reach. He was, at that time, the anti-Reagan, a powerful and resonant voice of dissent in the age of “Top Gun” and Alex P. Keaton. Cuomo, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were the three titans of the day who seemed to possess the defiance needed to rescue liberalism from obsolescence.

In contrast, Bai’s reporting shows hostility toward conservative ideas and people, notably a July 18, 2010 story in which he conjured up a fiction of “hateful 25-year-olds” hurling racial slurs at Tea Party rallies.

The NY Times Takes Two More Left Jabs at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
By Clay Waters | February 25, 2011 | 1:04 PM EST

Matt Bai’s upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine cover profile of Chris Christie, New Jersey's attention-getting Republican governor, has its questionable moments, but the overall tone was far more temperate than a teaser the Times used to promote it, featured on the front page of nytimes.com Thursday evening.

The segment of Bai's long story the Times chose to highlight is one that just happens to feed into the liberal complaint that President Ronald Reagan stigmatized welfare recipients as "welfare queens." (Bai's reference to "welfare queens" in the text is milder in context.)

The teaser reads: "The governor of New Jersey became the most celebrated Republican in America by tagging public-sector workers -- especially teachers -- as 21st-century welfare queens."

Move Over, Palin: NYT's Matt Bai Uncovers New Bogeymen for AZ Shooter, Sharron Angle
By Clay Waters | January 11, 2011 | 4:22 PM EST

On Sunday, New York Times political reporter/columnist Matt Bai wondered if we are at the start of a “terrifying new” moment in political violence in “A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?” Bai argued that the act of Republican politicians saying standard political things was somehow fueling the rhetorical flames.

He at least appeared evenhanded at the beginning.

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

The NY Times Runs a (Half) Correction on Matt Bai's Phony Tea Party Racism Charge
By Clay Waters | July 28, 2010 | 1:36 PM EDT
On Sunday, the New York Times issued a surprise half-correction to the unverified claim, made in Matt Bai's July 18 story, that racial epithets were hurled at Democratic congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis during protests against Obama-care at the U.S. Capitol on March 20. Bai wrote:
The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.
The portion in bold above has now been omitted from the online version of Bai's story. Here's the correction, in Sunday's edition:
NYT Political Writer Repeats False Tea Party Racism Charge
By P.J. Gladnick | July 19, 2010 | 9:52 AM EDT

Just how much of a liberal cocoon does New York Times political reporter Matt Bai live in? Apparently a mighty thick one judging by the fact that he thought he could repeat a provably false lie about a supposed example of Tea Party racism in his most recent article. Almost everybody with even a little bit of political savvy can already guess what example I am referring to but let us allow Bai to repeat the false charge:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

What? NYT Says G.O.P. Misses Liberal Sen. Chafee's 'Traditional Notion of Fiscal Responsibility'
By Clay Waters | July 16, 2010 | 9:35 AM EDT
New York Times writer Matt Bai's Thursday "Political Times" column, "A Risky Campaign Tactic: Unpleasant Truth," heralded the comeback of former liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee, who left the party after losing his re-election bid in 2006 and is running for governor of Rhode Island as an independent. What brave-if-brutal "truth" is Chafee telling? The need for tax hikes, naturally.
There's a lot of talk in Washington these days about "hard choices"-- specifically, about why no one ever seems to make them. A lot of policy experts and former members of Congress (who no longer have to run) will assure you, for instance, that the only way to shrink the national debt is through some combination of higher taxes and reduced spending on entitlement and military programs. The problem is that politicians generally want to keep their jobs, and they highly doubt the proposition that voters can be persuaded to embrace even modestly painful solutions in an unforgiving political environment.

This is precisely the proposition being tested, however, in this tiny state, where Lincoln Chafee is running for governor as an independent. Mr. Chafee, you may recall, served seven seemingly tortured years as a Republican senator opposed to his own president's agenda, before the voters -- exasperated with Republicans, period -- cut him loose in 2006. Adrift like other Republican moderates, Mr. Chafee broke with the party altogether and has now decided to run his own kind of highly unusual campaign, based on the risky premise that unpleasant times demand some unpleasant truths.
November Election Already 'Mightily Out of Control' for G.O.P., Says Front-Page Blurb in NY Times
By Clay Waters | June 10, 2010 | 5:11 PM EDT

One of the New York Times's favorite themes is the ever-impending Republican civil war that will ruin the party's chances in whatever election that's coming up. Former chief political reporter Adam Nagourney is a past master, but he's now covering the West Coast. Luckily, Times contributor Matt Bai was there to fill the gap Thursday, explaining how the Republicans may blow a great opportunity through ruinous infighting in the primaries.


The assumption behind Bai's "Political Times" piece "For Republicans, Sorting Out Candidates Gets a Bit Messy" is that a crowded field of candidates in the Republican primaries is a bad thing.

A front-page, above-the-fold teaser distorted one of Bai's already premature judgements, leaving out his qualifier to suggest Republican prospects are already sunk: "Some critics are already asking Republican leaders how they managed to let a promising election season get so mightily out of control."

Times Watch Quotes of Note 2008 -- The NYT's Worst Quotes of the Year
By Clay Waters | December 18, 2008 | 11:36 AM EST

The New York Times's embrace of Barack Obama's candidacy, and its fervent defense of him against John McCain's "racist" and unfair attacks, made 2008 a particularly bias-packed year for the paper. During the 2008 campaign Times bias often came with a smile, instead of a snarl, with the Times and the rest of the mainstream media having fallen hard for Obama's "historic" candidacy (jilting its previous love, Hillary Clinton). The Times even praised the moderate maverick McCain for a while -- until he clinched the Republican nomination and became the only thing in the way of a groundbreaking victory for either a liberal woman (Clinton) or a liberal African-American (Obama). Below are the favorite quotes from Times Watch's five Times-dissecting judges. You can read all of the worst quotes of Campaign 2008 at Times Watch.Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker, and Don Luskin, publisher of the blog The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, both chose this quote from reporter Steven Erlanger:

"On Thursday evening in a glittering Berlin, cheered by as many as 200,000 people, Mr. Obama delivered a tone poem to American and European ideals and shared history. In contrast, just before he spoke, Mr. McCain, was sitting in Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, having a bratwurst, and saying grumpily that he would prefer to speak to Germans when he is president, not before." -- Steven Erlanger in a July 26 filing from Paris while covering Barack Obama's world tour.
Obama Hits Fox News for Painting Him as 'Latte-Sipping, NYT-Reading' Liberal
By Clay Waters | October 15, 2008 | 10:19 PM EDT

The New York Times posted on its website Wednesday political writer Matt Bai's long profile of Barack Obama, which will be featured in the next edition of the Times Sunday Magazine. Near the end of the 8,800-word piece, in which Bai talked to Obama on his campaign plane, the Democrat dropped a backhanded tribute to Fox News, which by his lights is not only frustrating him in the polls, but is part of a wider apparatus "designed to perpetuate" the country's "cultural schism." Obama even identified New York Times reading as a reliable signifier of effete liberalsm.