Stop Me Before I Vote Again

New York magazine, as we all know, is the place to go if you want a read on the sensibility of a certain type of self-delighted urbanite, for whom brand choice is identity. Here's chapter and verse from the Bible of the Top Ten list:

... she’d show up to interviews looking like, she says, “a 14-year-old boy” in puffy Samantha Ronson sneakers with iPod headphones dangling from her ears—but then she’d easily segue into an informed foreign- policy or economic discussion that ended with a Daily Show–worthy punch line. Her résumé is similarly unexpected: A Rhodes scholar and an Oxford Ph.D., she’s done stints as an AIDS activist, barista, landscaper, Air America host, and mascot in an inflatable calculator suit. She’s a civics geek who reads comic books, goes to monster-truck rallies, likes to fish, calls herself an “amateur mixologist” of classic cocktails, and even Twitters.

There’s something about the mix of personal details that is—to a young, educated, left-leaning, cosmopolitan audience—instantly recognizable. As one New York acolyte told me, “She is more like one of my friends than anyone else on television.”

OK, who is this "pear-wit"?

Here is a primer on this "ballsy gremlin of the left" (not to mention "a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer").

Thanks, SK. I was afraid he was talking about the other ballsy gremlin on Air America, Randi Rhodes. Not perfect, I know, but enjoyable when you're stuck in traffic.

As ad critic Leslie Savan says, follow the flattery.

This over-enunciating Dembot pimpette knows less than half of what she thinks she knows. But her self-conscious wonk style and constant mentioning of her credentials bludgeons the listener into not thinking about severe limits of the repackaged dreck she peddles. If you listen to her, you just must be smart and hip...

Eh. Maddow has been shilling for the dnc since Hector was a pup. She's "left" much in the same way Nosferatu was "vegetarian."