http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-confessions-of-a-columnist.html?ref=opinionConfessions of a Columnist
JAN. 3, 2015
Ross Douthat
That’s because I strongly suspected various forces would keep Bush on the sidelines: his wife’s likely opposition, a sense of Bush-dynasty fatigue among the party’s machers, and all the very human reasons a wealthy, comfortable, relaxed 60-something who last campaigned for office a dozen years ago might decide to pass on the presidential madhouse.
These suspicions could still be vindicated; Bush’s recently announced “exploration” could end before the first primary vote is cast. But he suddenly looks much more like a full-speed-ahead candidate than I expected, and — in what counts as clear bad news for Rubio and Christie, among others — many of the party’s donors and operatives seem not at all deterred by his filial connection to a deeply unpopular president.
Jeb the serious candidate isn’t Jeb the front-runner, or at least not yet. But his apparent plan to run is a big, important 2016 fact, and one my 2014 columns failed to sufficiently anticipate.
2. I was too optimistic about the prospects for demilitarizing the police. In an August column during the early days of protest in Ferguson, Mo., I argued that while many reforms to the criminal justice system might come with difficult trade-offs, the case for limiting the flow of heavy weapons — grenade launchers, armored cars, and so on — from the military to local police departments was “easy, uncomplicated, clear.” Crime rates keep falling, the threat of terrorism is more marginal than it seemed after 9/11, and there isn’t a justification for giving cops in places like Ferguson the armaments of an occupying force.
To which I would have been wise to add: “And yet they’re likely to keep getting weapons anyway.” The flurry of congressional interest faded once police unions flexed some muscle. The White House is notionally committed to tougher standards, but its proposals seem likely to add paperwork without meaningfully reducing the flow of arms.
Programs in motion tend to stay in motion, that much is always true. But I didn’t foresee that Ferguson itself, initially a story that produced bipartisan sympathy for the protesters, would turn into a weak and polarizing exhibit in the case for policing reform.
The persistent rioting made the argument that the cops needed all their gear seem more plausible (though I am not convinced), and the facts of the original tragedy, the shooting of Michael Brown, turned out to make a weaker case against the police than suggested by the initial coverage.
The hard truth — which is also on display in New York right now — is that crime and punishment stir up (for good reason) the strongest of human emotions, which makes achieving consensus on reform slow, hard work. This process can be hastened by particular injustices, but when the facts are bad or complicated, it can just as easily be set back.
3. I gave America’s Ebola countermeasures too little credit. In an October column on the public health fiascos that allowed the deadly virus to infect American health care workers, I wrote that if “we manage to contain Ebola domestically, then the president and his appointees will look more competent and levelheaded than their critics.” But I wasn’t particularly confident in that outcome, and so — worried about a wider outbreak — I also wrote that “travel restrictions increasingly seem like an appropriate hedge against ongoing domestic incompetence.”
Two months later, there has been no wider outbreak, most of the cases treated domestically have resulted in a cure, and the president and his appointees can reasonably claim vindication. (As can Dr. Paul Farmer, the famous physician-humanitarian, who argued in an October essay for the London Review of Books that with Western standards of medical treatment, Ebola victims could have a 90 percent survival rate.) So I was too alarmist, often a pundit’s besetting vice.
But while pessimism can be an analytic mistake, it’s the happiest way to be wrong. So if infallibility remains out of reach, my hope for 2015 is that my columns will only err in undue pessimism, and that reality will only surprise me — and you, and all of us — with good news.
IN the new year, it goes without saying that we should all eat more vegetables, exercise more often, tweet or text a little less and pray a little more. But for the professional pundit, there’s really only one resolution that matters: Be less wrong.
So in that spirit, here is my annual inventory of the places where I went astray in 2014, offered in the hope that beginning 2015 with a confession will lead to fewer mistakes in the year to come.
1. I thought Jeb Bush wasn’t really serious about 2016. In two columns on the Republican presidential field, in March and in November, I didn’t exactly write off a Bush candidacy. But I spent far more time on Marco Rubio (whose chances I felt were being underestimated) and Rand Paul, and to a lesser extent Chris Christie and Ted Cruz, than I did on the former Florida governor.
