MSNBC Panel Blames Itself for 2016 Speculation, Proceeds to Do It Anyway

There has yet to be a cable-news segment on the 2016 presidential race that hasn’t ended with at least one member of the discussion noting that the race is 3.5 years away and that the previous few minutes had been an empty exercise. But the Daily Rundown Monday morning inflated this fleeting self-awareness into a giant meta-segment, in which everybody involved seemed to be trying to get themselves, unsuccessfully, to stop what they’re doing.

MSNBC senior political analyst Chuck Todd has spent the past two days pushing his theory that Hillary Clinton is getting way ahead of herself by jumping into the political arena rather than “taking a year off, like we all thought she would.” His proof is almost entirely limited to a speech Clinton gave last week on voting rights, because apparently the only reason a political figure would speak out on one of the most vile anti-democratic (small- and large-d) bills currently slithering through various state legislatures is the fulfillment of personal ambition.

This morning, even Todd seemed to catch that he may be reading his own professional desires into Clinton’s actions, and Dan Balz agreed with him:

Todd: “We have dined out on candidates starting presidential campaigns early for decades. In some ways, we love it as political junkies. What’s always surprising to me is when frontrunners, who don’t need to do it, dip in too early. Hillary Clinton, dipping too fast?”

Balz: “Part of this is driven by us. Our appetite to get to the next campaign grows exponentially with each cycle, and I think you’re seeing it this time. So that’s part of it. The other is could she avoid it anyway? She’s being drawn into the conversation in a sense whether she contributes to it or not. The fact that she’s decided to contribute to it, it may be a little surprising that she’s doing it early. But in terms of trying to talk about her own policies and where she fits, maybe she needs to do it earlier rather than later.”

Excellent analysis! Clinton might not be running for president, and it’s just the media is layering its own narrative structures over her that makes it appear so. Or she might be running for president in 2015 and just addressing issues she cares about right now—the two are not mutually exclusive, or necessarily connected. It’s entirely possible she is taking a year off from campaigning, but not from political issues, as the Clintons tend to be a little involved in policy.

But Todd immediately followed up with:

“What is the case to doing what she’s doing? What’s the defense of it? Because I got to tell you: you talk to any presidential strategist, who all think the process is too long, and that long process has hurt front-runners—they don’t get it.”

And thus Todd enacts the exact the behavior he just diagnosed, without even a smoke break in between. Having but a moment ago admitted that professional election watchers thrive upon artificial and anticipatory narratives that read causal connections onto unrelated behavior out of professional need, he proceeds to be flummoxed as to why he can’t make sense of Clinton’s behavior without them. You know who he should see about that? Chuck Todd from twenty seconds ago.

Perry Bacon, Jr. of the Grio nailed this in his answer:

You’ll laugh at this: one defense of this is that she may not run for president. And in that case, voting rights is something should talk about, because she wants to be a Democratic leader, someone who sets out ideas for the party. That is one case to make.

Good! Why wouldn’t she talk about voting rights, especially following the Supreme Court’s disastrous uprooting of them? Why isn’t everyone, potential presidential candidate or not? But then:

The other of course is: if you run really smartly in 2013 and 2014, maybe you don’t have to run in 2015. Maybe she clears the field.

He was so close.

Liz Sidoti from the Associated Press even noted that if Clinton is running this early, the media is doing her laundry for her by covering it:

We’re going to cover her now, regardless of whether or not she’s running, because she is a national political figure, and the question’s still out there. So if the negative stuff is going to come out—if they don’t give us something to write about, we’re going to actually go and look for other things to report.

That reads almost like a confession.

Thus did this panel accurately determine that not only does the media jumpstart the presidential election cycle early, but that it even helps candidates by doing so. The answer to Chuck Todd’s two-day question, asked on Meet the Press, Morning Joe, and the Daily Rundown, of “Why is Hillary running so early?” is “Because Chuck Todd is asking ‘Why is Hillary running so early?'” He posed a query to which he himself was the answer, and it took him three shows to get it.

Because none of these segments can end without a recognition of their pointlessness, Sidoti finished it out: “The question is, will voters remember any of that? You know, come on, it’s three-and-a-half years out.” That sounds like a coda; it’s really a repeat sign.

Watch the full clip below, via MSNBC:

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.