The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."
A columnist for the Sun, Alicia Colon, said writers who pull no punches in their news pieces might not be able handle the give-and-take of political negotiations and campaigning. "To be a politician you have to compromise, and I don't think a lot of editors or columnists would be able to do it." Ms. Colon said. "Maybe they have too much integrity.
Way to dig deep to find someone to represent extremism, NY Sun. Extremism of integrity, that is. But is it really too much integrity that stops columnists from taking their rightful place as our leaders—or is it that the masses are simply afraid of their intellectual honesty?
"We have a nasty tendency to see complexities in life, and I suspect your average politician likes to think in more terms of black and white," [NYT columnist Clyde] Haberman said yesterday in an interview. "They don't get bothered too much by all the gray that defines life for most people."
