Joe Scarborough: Bhutto Assassination Helps Rudy And Hillary
December 27, 2007 -- 11:11 AM EST // //

It's the predictability of this stuff that can sometimes get to you. Here's NBC's Joe Scarborough saying -- already! -- that Bhutto's assassination helps Rudy and Hillary:

As Atrios says, the logic is very tortured here indeed. But it's actually worse than that. This rank bit of punditry serves as yet another reminder of just how gullible the pundit corps in general has been about Rudy's candidacy, on two levels: First, the near wholesale acceptance of the idea that Rudy's mayoralty counts as counter-terrorism experience; and second, the presumption that he automatically has a political advantage on terrorism over his rivals.

The most recent polling on terrorism in the GOP primary that I can find suggests there's no reason to presume Rudy has an advantage on it:

33. Compared to the other candidates running for the Republican party's nomination, do you think Rudy Giuliani would do a better job fighting terrorism, a worse job, or about the same job fighting terrorism as the other Republican candidates?

Better 26%

Worse 3%

About same 61%

It's also worth considering Scarborough's claim that the Bhutto assassination automatically benefits Hillary. Whatever you think of Hillary, he is obviously basing this diagnosis on the presumption that voters automatically look to presumed hawkish candidates in times of peril and confusion. According to this reading, voters will automatically conclude in such situations that they want the candidate who is imagined to be "more willing to use force," whatever that means. There's no chance that voters could be actually evaluating each candidate's foreign policy ideas.

But there's no earthly reason, as Ben Smith notes, to discount the possibility that the assassination could make people more receptive to Obama's argument that "the Clinton/Bush status quo has produced disaster after disaster, and it's time for a change."

Look, I don't have any idea who will benefit politically from Bhutto's assassination. But the point is, neither does Scarborough -- yet he goes right ahead and tells us that it's Rudy and Hillary, anyway. This is just punditry on auto-pilot, the reflexive serving up of diagnoses based on the same old flawed assumptions that have under-girded establishment punditry for well over a decade now, unchanged by external events or all evidence to the contrary. And we'll undoubtedly be hearing lots more of this in the days ahead.

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