It was time for Rampell's column again!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2024

Nary a word was said: Is our nation's discourse possibly dogged by recognizable types of disorder?

Consider what happened early this morning at the Washington Post.

It was time for Catherine Rampell's column to appear again. In her previous column—it appeared in the hard-copy paper last Friday—she had possibly seemed to make one or two types of mistake.

She had trashed one part of the Candidate Harris's economic plan—in a way she seemed to disavow the very next day! And as we noted this morning, she had done so in a strikingly snarky way.

It's as we showed you this morning! Snarky dual headline included, here's how that column started:

When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.

“Price gouging” is the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic agenda, her presidential campaign says. She’ll crack down on “excessive prices” and “excessive corporate profits,” particularly for groceries.

So what level counts as “excessive,” you might ask? TBD, but Harris will ban it.

That’s the thing about price gouging: As has been said of hardcore pornography, you know it when you see it.

The snark was general over last Friday's column. (It appeared online last Thursday.) Including a type of comparison to hardcore pornography possibly didn't help.

"It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Harris’s price-gouging proposal is," the dual headline said. You can't (quite) blame that on a headline writer, because that's (almost) what Rampell's explicitly column said:

The most likely template for Harris’s proposal is a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). (Harris co-sponsored similar legislation with Warren in 2020, when Harris was a senator.) Warren’s bill would ban any “grossly excessive price” during any “atypical disruption” of a market. Alas, no definition was provided for these terms, either; rather, the bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce bans using any metric it deems appropriate.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

"It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is." That's precisely what Rampell said in last week's column—except she was talking about an actual piece of legislation, an actual bill recently offered by Senator Warren.

As she did, she was speculating about what type of legislation a President Harris might propose. The headline writer transferred "hard to exaggerate how bad this is" from Senator Warren's actual bill over to Harris's possible future "proposal."

At any rate:

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Harris’s proposal is, last week's headline said. Which is perhaps a bit ironic, because, as it turns out, that seems to be what Rampell's original column did!

Rampell had rushed into print with what seems to have been a premature assessment—a premature, second- or third-hand assessment. She had tied her assessment to a news report in the Post—a news report which was, in turn, based on a press release which apparently hadn't said anything about "price controls."

The snark was strong in Rampell's column—and, as it turned out, Rampell's snarky assessment seems to have been premature. We say that because Rampell herself seems to have said so, though only in a tweet the next day which almost no one has seen.

Rampell walked her initial assessment back the very next day. That said, a possible hint of arrogance was still perhaps on hand:

Rampell's tweet
Yes there was still some silliness in her speech, but her comments on prices were more toned down than campaign factsheet sent to reporters (punishing companies that raise prices above their costs etc). A generic call to increase antitrust enforcement is fine and I support it.

Forget about the news report based on that "campaign factsheet"—the campaign factsheet which Rampell never quoted. After watching Harris's actual economic address, Rampell said her proposal was actually fine, and that she supports it!

That said, she still saw "some silliness in [Harris's] speech." Under the circumstances, the hubris might seem a bit strong.

Rampell mocked Harris last Thursday in her original column. On Friday, she mocked her on CNN.

Then, after watching her actual economic address, she seemed to reverse her initial assessment. Today would have been the perfect day to explain what happened—to clarify the policy matter and perhaps to help us see how journalism can seem to go wrong.

Instead, her new column concerns a totally different matter. Except on every show on the Fox News Channel, those alleged "price controls" are long gone.

This would have been the perfect day to clarify the tsunami of snark Rampell dropped on Harris's head. Last Thursday and Friday, she mocked the candidate in her Post column, then on CNN.

She proceeded to take it back in a tweet—a tweet which nobody saw.

Concerning that campaign factsheet: Did the initial press release from the Harris campaign ever propose "price controls?" 

In the post to which we linked this morning, Kevin Drum says he thinks that he has run down the full text of the press release in question. In his estimation, there's nothing in there about "price controls," and the term itself never appears.

You can see that full text in Drum's report. Today would have been an excellent day to unravel this instant brouhaha, which will live forever on Fox.