Campaign coverage for people who hate campaign coverage.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to be reading a lot of Matt Taibbi this election season.

As someone with zero ability to deal with the Monday-Night-Football strategy-analysis approach of the cable channels that has bled into all the other media outlets, I'm tempted to sequester myself with my math books and MacIntyre until November rolls around and I can cast my single-issue, pro-life vote, then try to forget about the whole thing again. But that's not responsible, is it?

So I'm glad Matt Taibbi's around. Who is he? Well, he became infamous as an editor of the sociopathic Moscow alternative weekly The Exile (which is, unfortunately, getting shut down by the Russian government), but came back to the US and ended up working as Rolling Stone's political writer in the 2004 election. A quick glance through his writing will prove that he is absolutely tasteless. After all, he's the guy who compiled the list of the funny things about John Paul II's death and got fired from the New York Press because of it. Frequently scatological and obscene, he's semi-renowned for his vicious descriptions of politicians' personal appearances. It seems clear to me that he would like Obama to be the next president, and he's pretty soft on the guy, even while he writes withering invective about McCain and Clinton. So what's to like?

I suppose that, in a perverse way, I trust the guy. His goal is to achieve this perverse sort of trustworthiness. He explained it to Salon:

…I try to have a narrative voice where people see exactly who I am and what kind of person I am. That makes it easier for them to digest the information that they're getting. If they decide that they trust me, they're going to trust the information that they read, and even if they disagree with me, they at least know where I'm coming from, and that's always a positive. The negative of that is that sometimes you do have language that turns people off.

Beneath the incendiary offensiveness, he's got a simple question: why can't we just talk about things like normal people? The Great Derangement is the title of Taibbi's latest book, which I have not read, as well as his term for the current political climate in the United States. People are turning to the crazy extremes (religion on the right, 9/11 Truth on the left), and politicians take advantage of the people's intense desire for something different by feeding them rhetoric that only makes the situation worse. And, although I'm sure he's well-compensated for his efforts, Taibbi has to listen to this stultifying rhetoric day after day on the campaign trail, then filter it out for us.

If there's a weakness in his writing, it's that he's still reporting on the reporters, on the strategies, and on the procedures of the election. He won't be the fastest to take into account any big changes in economics or geopolitics. Would I trust him on policy issues? Never. But for a ground view of the absurdities of our electoral system, I can't find anyone better.