Prometheus 6

When the Right Voice Goes Wrong
Douthat’s latest Times column: a close reading
By Megan Garber

What to make of Ross Douthat’s latest New York Times column? The piece (which answers the world’s plaintive pleas for yet more discussion of Obama’s Nobel Prize) is spectacularly unconvincing and yet oddly glib—to the extent that the weirdness of it all is almost difficult to quantify.

But we shall try. So, a list: Stuff Wrong with Ross Douthat’s Latest Column.

From the top:

1. The histrionic headline.

2. The timing of the argument, generally.

3. The unfortunate use of the word ‘hoo-ha.’

4. The point-undermining partisanship, in the manner of Bill Kristol.

5. The commission of the intentional fallacy. “True, Obama didn’t ask for this,” Douthat writes. “It was obvious, from his halting delivery and slightly shamefaced air last Friday, that he wishes the Nobel committee hadn’t put him in this spot.” But it doesn’t take a Times column or a Yale degree or a few sentient moments spent in a high school English class to know that such a facile construction of authorial emotion, from anyone besides the author himself, is illegitimate and, more to the point, irrelevant. (Also: “slightly shamefaced air”? Perhaps Douthat caught an evening show of the speech while the rest of the world saw the matinee; but even his downgraded description of presidential contrition here seems guided less by cool-headed observation than by the warped lens of…#4.)

6. The self-contradiction.

7. The inaccuracy.

8. The brazen hyperbole. Near the end of the column, Douthat refers to Obama’s win of the Nobel Prize as “this travesty.” Yes. This is a direct quote. (This is also, if you’re wondering, the point in the column at which I finally concluded that Douthat’s effort in this case may deserve the same epithet.) “By accepting the prize, he’s made failure, if and when it comes, that much more embarrassing and difficult to bear,” Douthat writes.

This reasoning is fairly absurd when applied to Obama (sure, the prize provides more irony-laden fodder for the president’s critics, but that fact does not a travesty make). Applied to Douthat, though—a young talent who has himself been given a pressure-cooker prize by way of a high-profile platform in The New York Times—the observation might be more true than the columnist would care to admit.