Matt Bai () writes the “Political Times” column for the New York Times and is a frequent contributor for the Times Magazine, where he covered both the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Bai often explores issues of generational change in American politics and society. His seminal cover stories in the magazine include the 2008 cover essay “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” and a 2004 profile of John Kerry titled “Kerry’s Undeclared War.” His work was honored in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of The Best American Political Writing.
Bai is also the author of The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, now available in paperback. The book, which chronicles the rise of the first Internet-age political movement and the people who built it, was honored as a New York Times Notable Book for 2007.
Bai contributed a personal essay to the anthology I Married My Mother-in-Law: And Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With...And Can’t Live Without, published by Riverhead Books in 2006. He is currently at work on a new book about the failed era of boomer politics for Alfred A. Knopf.
Before joining the Times Magazine in 2002, Bai, 41, spent five years as a national correspondent for Newsweek. In 2001, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, where he led a seminar on the next generation of political journalism. He began his career as a city desk reporter for the Boston Globe, and his international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia. Bai is a graduate of Tufts and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty awarded him the prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, he now lives with his wife and two small children in Washington. He answers questions from readers on his website, http://www.mattbai.com.
He began his career as a speechwriter for the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, writing for Audrey Hepburn, among others, and his international coverage includes reporting from Liberia and Iraq.
Before joining the Times Magazine, Bai was city desk reporter for the Boston Globe and a national correspondent for Newsweek magazine. In 2002, he left Newsweek to become the national affairs columnist at Rolling Stone magazine, but the magazine was in turmoil and the arrangement soon unraveled. On his website, Bai writes that this “disastrous little stint” involved “no articles and a lot of weirdness, but I'm contractually prohibited from talking about that.”
In 2001, Bai was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he led a seminar on the next generation of political journalism.
Bai's book, The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, is a critically acclaimed and controversial account of the “new progressive movement” in America and the people who built it. The Argument was the only political book to be named a New York Times Notable Book for 2007.
Other work by Bai for the New York Times Magazine has included cover stories on John McCain’s philosophy about war and Barack Obama’s strategy to win over white men, as well as a much-discussed cover essay, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”. During the 2008 primaries, Bai wrote an online blog, The Primary Argument, on The New York Times website. He publishes frequent short essays in the magazine and has a campaign blog (now billed as a weekly column).
His 2004 coverage for the magazine included some of the seminal stories of that campaign, including cover pieces on the future of Democratic politics and on John Kerry’s views on terrorism. Bai also wrote two cover-length pieces on the campaign in Ohio...one looking at the Republican turnout machine before the start of the general election campaign and one on the Democrats’ efforts during the final week.
Bai’s work was featured in both the 2005 and 2006 editions of The Best American Political Writing (Thunder’s Mouth Press). He also wrote a personal essay about his Japanese American in-laws for the anthology I Married My Mother-in-Law: And Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With...and Can’t Live Without (Riverhead Books, 2006).
In a 2007 interview with the Progressive Book Club, Bai said his political work is more influenced by novelists writing about urban decline in America than by other political writers. “I think novelists have done a better job on the whole of describing the confusing moment we’re in, in this post-industrial era,” he said. “Writers like Philip Roth, Richard Russo (especially Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool), Richard Ford (especially The Sportswriter)...they’ve really tapped into a deep confusion."
Bai has earned both admirers and critics with his recurring theme that both political parties, and Democrats in particular, are lacking vision and have failed to adapt their agendas to the realities of a new century. His work often takes on a generational tone. In a Times Magazine essay after the 2006 midterm elections, Bai wrote:
the growing frustration of voters with the Washington crowd of both parties, who seem stuck in the same ideological debate they were having in 1975, while the rest of the country struggles mightily with the emerging economic and international threats of 2006 The era of baby-boomer politics...with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all...is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological...and not a moment too soon.
Bai is among the few major journalists to have engaged with liberal bloggers on their own sites and meetings. He moderated the Democratic presidential debate at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago in 2007. He has generally defended his colleagues in the media against the bloggers’ allegations of laziness and bias. “I don’t think it’s accurate,” he told the Columbia Journalism Review in a 2005 interview:
I think it has aspects of accuracy. But I think it’s a caricature. It’s healthy for us to have a conversation about what we can do differently and what we’ve done wrong. There are aspects of political journalism in the last several years, since I’ve been doing it, that should give us pause.
In particular, Bai has been critical of reporters acting as pundits on cable television, despite the fact that he has appeared on many of those shows). He has also criticized his colleagues for an obsession with process. “If politics was [sic] the pursuit of winning elections, and the end in and of itself was just about who was victorious on Election Day, I wouldn’t have much interest in covering politics,” he told MediaBistro in 2008.
Speaking to Harper's in 2008, Bai hit on a theme he has often raised about mainstream journalism in the Bush era:
I often say that we’re leaving the era of persuasion and entering the era of confirmation. A lot of people don’t want to learn from what they read—they just want it to instantly validate what they already believe, and if it doesn’t do that, they just dismiss it and go to one of the 2,000 websites that will. No one has to leave their [sic] intellectual comfort zones anymore. And unfortunately we have some columnists and commentators who are all too willing to blindly validate one worldview or the other, because it’s very gratifying to be loved like that. But that’s not our job. Our job is to challenge your preconceptions and our own. And when you do that, someone’s always going to complain.
The Argument, published in August 2007, centers on the machinations of a varied cast of progressive activists and Democratic leaders, including the netroots pioneers Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong; Democratic Party Chairman and former presidential candidate Howard Dean; the leaders of MoveOn.org; a secret group of 100 wealthy Democratic philanthropists known as The Democracy Alliance; former President Bill Clinton; Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; and the blogger Gina Cooper, founder what is now Netroots Nation.
Bai's book sparked reactions from reviewers in print and online. Reviewers in the media were generally positive about the book, even if they didn’t uniformly accept its premise that the modern Democratic Party was still groping for a coherent vision of 20th century government. “I had more fun reading The Argument than I’ve had reading any political book in ages,” Kevin Drum wrote in the Washington Monthly. The Economist said the book was “engaging and painstakingly reported” and the Washington Post called it “unsparing, incisive and altogether engaging” and a “must read.” The Argument received positive reviews in newspapers such as the New York Times and Boston Globe, as well as in progressive media outlets like Mother Jones.
The reaction on the progressive blogs, however, ranged from dismissive to furious. Most in the netroots took issue with Bai’s central premise...that simply wanting to depose Republicans and reverse their policies didn’t amount to a compelling vision for the country. “Unlike Matt Bai, I think undoing the disasters of the Bush administration makes for good policy as well as good politics,” wrote Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon.com. “Democrats and other Bush-haters should read The Argument to see what Bai sees. Then they should draw completely different conclusions, and get back to work saving the country.” Panning Bai’s book on the blog Daily Kos, Miss Laura wrote, “The man is simply not able to diagnose the problems Democrats face, or to comprehend even that he is in the presence of evidence about what’s going on in American politics if it does not agree with his own pre-conceptions.”Miss Laura. Blog review, Daily Kos, 2 September 2007.
Bai debated and discussed the book with commenters on some of the major progressive blogs, including Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, winning some converts in the process. In an interview on Daily Kos Bai shrugged off his critics. “A lot of people who have criticized the book online admit they haven’t actually read it,” he said. “They’re going on what other bloggers have said. That is a little disappointing. I think there are a whole lot of smart people who read the blogs who will read the book and make their own judgments.”
The Argument was published in paperback in August 2008, with a new and shorter subtitle: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.
