Stupidest Magazine Editor Alive?

A correspondent asks me what I think of John Micklethwait as boss of the Economist. I think he may well be a disaster. Look at the kind of stuff he was writing in mid-2003:

Economist.com: Lexington: July 5, 2003: The Hillary factor: IS THERE anything one less wants to revisit than the Clinton wars?... Sidney Blumenthal... Clinton brown-noser... tediously one-sided.... Now the wronged woman herself... who in their right mind wants to be dragged back to Whitewater, the pouting intern or any of the other features of Clintonia, that bitchy, chaotic house party where American politics summered in the 1990s?....

George Bush... has done pretty well by fighting hard for his own team.... Mrs Clinton... has Mr Bush's capacity to elicit frenzied support from her core constituency....

Bush's ability to destabilise her enemies. One reason why liberals can't lay a finger on Mr Bush is that they are just too damn angry to punch straight: read, say, Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times and you are often left worrying less about the commander-in-chief than about the columnist-in-a-tizz....

All this points to the third big similarity between Mrs Clinton and Mr Bush: self-discipline.... There has been a palpable change in the White House's productivity: nobody was better at analysing a problem late into the night than Mr Clinton; but Mr Bush actually gets things done...

Now as of mid-2003, the outlines of the Bush story were already clear: a crew that were very good at politics, but hopeless and hapless at policy. The small-government Republicans were already furious at what Bush had done to spending and the deficit. The foreign-policy realist Republicans were already furious at Bush's diversion of U.S. effort away from the war against Al Qaeda onto the sideshow of Saddam Hussein. The Republicans who knew anything about the Middle East were already furious at Bush's refusal to take postwar Iraqi reconstruction seriously: hope was not a plan. Flotillas of Bush subcabinet officials were telling stories at dinner parties all over Washington about how the underbriefed Bush made seat-of-the-pants decisions--and then would never revisit them no matter how dumb they turned out to be.

Micklethwait knew all this. Micklethwait doesn't claim that Paul Krugman's critiques are wrong--only that they are "shrill." He doesn't claim that Bush's policies make sense or that the Bush White House makes good decisions--only that it "gets things done." He hopes to distract attention from the already-harsh judgments of Bush by the reality-based community by waving the bloody shirt:

Since September 11th, the United States has had more important things to think about...

So why didn't Micklethwait use any of his column inches to tell his readers the real story of the Bush policy clown show that he knew was ongoing in 2003? Was it fear of being cut off by inside administration sources? Was it that he regarded himself as on the Republican side--a cheerleader for the team? Was it that the corporate masters of the Economist had made a decision that their columnists should lean Republican in an attempt to expand circulation among America's upper and overclasses? Was it that he was such a bad judge of sources that he believed the spin of the White House media machine?

I don't know.