ChatGPT Writes Stunningly Awful Megan McArdle Column … Wait, No, It’s The Real Megan McArdle

There are bad political opinion columns. (We have written a few ourselves!) Then there is whatever the hell this is from the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle. Is this an early contender for worst column you will read about a candidate during our interminable presidential campaign season? It’s early, but yes.

Seriously. Our eyes are bleeding. She’s Peggy Noonan without style.

Lord, the things we read for you people. You’re welcome.

Anyway:

Vivek Ramaswamy is emerging into the spotlight. His poll numbers are still pretty low, not even 4 percent, but they are rising at a brisk clip, which is more than anyone else in the Republican presidential field except former president Donald Trump can say.

That link goes to a poll tracker from Real Clear Politics. Ramaswamy is that second green line (WHY, Real Clear Politics?), the one in the lower right corner:

Screenshot: Real Clear Politics

Ramaswamy’s polling average actually dropped by four-tenths of a percent this past week while McArdle was writing this column. And when you start out at 3.3 percent, four-tenths is a good-sized drop.

If you’re going to take these averages this seriously nine months before voting starts, at least describe them somewhere in the universe of accurately.

So far, Ramaswamy’s rise is broadly in keeping with the historical GOP tradition of regularly catapulting some long-shot primary candidate into his 15 minutes of fame — and then out again onto the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit.

Here we have the pundit’s self-fulfilling prophecy: The obscure candidate is rising (again, not according to the polls) because the nation’s bored political opinion columnists are writing columns in the nation’s most widely read newspapers telling you he’s rising. All this means is that whatever consultants Ramaswamy is overpaying to get him some earned media are actually doing their job.

It’s fair to wonder because, eight years on, no one understands exactly what made Trump different from predecessors such as Herman Cain. I have a theory and so do you, but no one can say for sure.

Sure we can. Trump had already been a national celebrity for 40 years, he was a genius at saying outrageous horseshit that kept the media’s attention on him, he had personal relationships with the president and owner of the nation’s most-watched 24-hour news network that he leveraged into hours upon hours upon hours of free media. Herman Cain was a Black man with a business career consisting mostly of running a sixth-rate national pizza chain who was trying to break through with a GOP base composed of suburban white people who think the 1964 Civil Rights Act is one of America’s greatest historical tragedies. Also he had all the personality and on-camera charisma of soggy Cheerios. This isn’t hard.

But if such a plan can work, Ramaswamy is the candidate most likely to execute it successfully. Imagine a Trump Scale running from 1 to 100, where 100 is Trump and 1 is a soft-spoken social worker who has been happily married to the same man for 43 years. Ramaswamy is about a 63, by far the closest match in the current primary field.

What … what even is this? You can’t just make up some sort of numerical scale to try and capture unquantifiable properties and then awkwardly shoehorn them into some sort of supporting evidence for your thesis. What if we said “Imagine a Christopher Rufo Dumbass Wingnut Scale where 100 is Christopher Rufo and 1 is an angry suburban dentist writing a Substack with fewer subscribers than Colonoscopy Monthly. Megan McArdle is about a 63, by far the closest match in the field.”

That would make zero sense, right? Also we’d rank Megan “Train Six-Year-Olds to Rush School Shooters” McArdle much closer to 100 if we were inclined to make up such a scale. Which we are not.

Ramaswamy’s fortune allows him to self-fund and puts him beyond economic sanction — and he has used that advantage to raise a giant middle finger to the liberal thinkers of the professional managerial class.

Most of the current Republican Party claims to be raising a giant middle finger to the liberal thinkers of the sneeringly dubbed professional managerial class. Ramaswamy is no more unusual in this regard than, like, this lunatic.

Also would it surprise you to learn that McArdle follows up this point by complimenting Ramaswamy for making Don Lemon mad during an early-morning interview that most of CNN’s audience probably has on as background noise while they’re trying to get the kids off to school? That’s not a feat akin to raising a middle finger at the professional managerial class, that’s just Tuesday.

Let Ramaswamy insult a moderator at a primetime debate badly enough that people are still talking about it eight years later and get back to us.

If he has a shot, it will be because he hits many of the same notes while remaining a little more upbeat, a lot more in command of policy details and even, occasionally, something of an old-fashioned market conservative.

Totally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about beating Donald Trump, it is that his fans care deeply about his command of policy details.

Also, remain upbeat? The current second place candidate in that polling average chart McArdle linked to earlier is Ron DeSantis, who is about as charming and upbeat as one of those mutant fish that live at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and go their entire lives without ever seeing light. And he’s ahead of Ramaswamy by almost 20 points.

He suggests we might curb the excesses of woke capital with an even stricter version of shareholder capitalism that forces companies to focus on profit — a solution a lot of CEOs might also prefer.

Woke capital is a nonsense term that we should not even indulge. But in the context in which the right wing uses it, plenty of companies manage to be extremely profitable while also remaining “woke” – that is, by embracing diversity in hiring and in their customer bases or by being environmentally conscious or whatever. You would think a libertarian would understand the whole concept of maximizing profits by maximizing your customer base. Hell, you’d think a seven-year-old understands that concept.

Of course companies can’t help it if conservatives are whiny piss babies who don’t want to share their shitty beer or their cheap, made-by-Indonesian-slave-labor T-shirts with gay people or transgender Instagram influencers. Fine. More Bud Light and knockoff Batman tees for Target’s customers who are not judgmental assholes.

Nor could he resolve conflicts over social issues by directing corporations to focus on profit rather than politics. If LGBTQ+ creatives quit Disney over its storylines, that is an issue of profitability.

That’s what we just said! If McArdle already knows policing the business of “woke corporations” is a bad idea, why is she telling Ramaswamy in the previous paragraph that it might be a winning one?

Is Megan McArdle secretly a shill for Donald Trump? Don’t know, but if we were Ramaswamy’s campaign consultant, we’d tell her to stop helping.

[Washington Post]

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