Who Put Adam Nagourney Up to His Thinly Sourced Article?

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney has an article suggesting Virginia Democrats are regretting their choice of Creigh Deeds as their candidate for governor.  Nagourney’s analysis of Deeds’ poor campaign is accurate, but there are several problems with it.

1.  It is thinly sourced.  The only  source cited is Virginia political analyst Robert Holsworth.  Generally, Holsworth provides credible insight (though his blog posts are written in a weird one sentence per paragraph style that disjoint his thinking), but no one else is cited in the article.

2.  Maybe it is “hard not to forgive some Virginia Democrats for thinking that they might have been better off with Mr. McAuliffe at the top of the ticket,”  but Nagourney offers no one, quoted anonymously or even referenced, to support his contention.

3. Nagourney’s conclusion – for with no sources that’s all this article is – is ludicrous.  Whatever disabilities Deeds has -– and he is, at best, an ineffective, some might say bumbling, campaigner -– the idea that Terry McAuliffe, an abrasive interloper in the Commonwealth’s politics, could draw more votes than Deeds isn’t credible.  Would he excite Democrats more?  Yes, probably.  Would he have more money to spend?  Most definitely.  But would he get anything more than the most yellow dog Democrats outside of Northern Virginia to vote for him?  Absolutely not.  With Dems reminding everyone of their fecklessness on Capitol Hill and Obama appearing uncertain, weak and all hat and no cattle, the idea that McAuliffe could win the race is unsupported. Obama won Virginia.  Bill Clinton didn’t.  With McAuliffe’s ties to the Clintons, there is little chance he could win this year – or any year, really.

So the question is, who put Nagourney up to this article?  In it, he states that McAuliffe himself and aides to Deeds and his opponent Bob McDonnell “did not respond to a request for comment.” So what possessed the reporter to write this story?  Someone’s pitch worked.  I doubt it was Holsworth, but whoever it was, they are still smoking – and inhaling – something.

Cross posted on News Commonsense.

Comments

[Vivian J. Paige]

I thought the same thing when I read it: that someone put him up to it.