Then, courtesy of Matt Yglesias, comes a link to a nearly two-year old write up in The Washington Monthly on Herbert. What leaps out at me most from this piece is the following:
It's true that elites don't care enough about the world of the working class or the poor. It's true that human nature is inherently biased against Herbert-style entreaties. These obstacles make his job very, very hard. But they are constants. A columnist must use the only variable, his column, to surmount them. Instead, Bob Herbert disregards them. His underlying problem turns out to be simple: he doesn't write with his audience in mind.
When I asked Herbert who he envisions his readers to be, he laughed. "I don't picture readers," he said. "I picture issues and the people that I'm covering." Likewise, when I inquired in an earlier conversation which journalists he considered to be role models, he demurred. "If I can, I'd like to take a pass on that. One, I don't want to talk about current journalists. And the second part is, I didn't model myself on journalists. There were politicians that were more influential to my thinking."
While the whole piece is worth reading for discovering the best pundit you've never heard of, there is an issue that the author of this profile, T. A. Frank, highlights but doesn't discuss too deeply - the relationship between some pundits and the politicians and others they write about. Unlike William Kristol, say, or Cokie Roberts, or even Paul Krugman (who also appears on the Times op-ed page), Herbert doesn't seem to care all that much about having some kind of relationship with those in the seats of power. He doesn't seem to care all that much about what they think. The fact that the conventional wisdom, personified in the truly stupid, even inept, anti-journalism of the Kristols and Roberts', and the high-minded liberal teeth-gnashing of the Krugmans, tends to circle around the way we discuss issues (and then, usually in ways that are almost mind-numbingly idiotic), Herbert talks about issues with intelligence, an eye toward how story and statistic fit together in the complex interactions of life, and manages to be angry without sounding it.
He isn't influential even though he sits on some of the most valuable opinion real estate in the country. He lives on the Upper West Side but his heart, and very often his column, is with those who could not afford a cab ride there. His writing is plain, unadorned, without pretension or provocation. His column on the Henry Louis Gates arrest sheds a light on the incident that, had it greater circulation, would have put Professor Gates reaction to Sgt. Crowley's behavior in an even more clear light. Alas, we have to listen to Juan Williams on NPR rather than read Bob Herbert in the Times to get some kind of "mainstream African-American" take on the incident, a take which, for the most part, has no idea that over the past couple years, African-American students, staff, and faculty at Harvard have encountered indignities and even threats from police.
I guess what I like about Herbert, thanks both to the profile, and now reading his work, is his insouciance. He doesn't really give a damn what insiders think or don't think. He is writing for himself, tossing his columns out in to a world where it is sad to say Cokie Roberts and David Brooks get far more attention. One hopes the situation changes.
