Is Reason Trying to Make the GOP 2016 Field Look Like a Bunch of White Males?
Short answer: No. Long answer: Et tu, Greta?
You may have seen within the conservative commentariat some complaint these past few days that the cover on the new issue of The New Yorker is trying to portray the Republican 2016 race as a club for white males only. As Mollie Hemingway headlines it over at The Federalist, "Latest New Yorker Cover Erases Women, Minorities From GOP Field." Here's the cover:
Leaving aside the complication that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are Latinos (who typically fall into the "minorities" category), let's grant some of the visual evidence here: It's a men's locker room, Hillary's on the outside looking in, why exactly would you have Mike Huckabee instead of Ben Carson, and so on. The magazine explained that it was going for electability here, that "somehow, one of these seven men is almost certainly right about his chances for the nomination," but you can understand the skepticism.
Well, this afternoon, Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren alleged on Neil Cavuto's program that the same skeptical analysis should be applied to this month's cover of Reason, holding up the offending issue to illustrate her point. I'm trying to locate a clip and transcript; one emailer described it as "She thinks Reason…slighted the woman (Carly Fiorina) and the black man (Ben Carson) in the field. She thinks Reason did it to increase subscriptions." Take a look at the cover:
This would help explain emails I received today like this:
Disappointed not find Carly Fiorina & Dr Ben Carson on the cover of your magazine.
Happy I didn't purchase
Alert readers will note that the candidates here are not in a boys' club of any sort, but gathered at the same table with Hillary Clinton, stuffing themselves with cake. In fact, you could even say that the cake—think of it as a metaphor—was more the focus here than the ethnic and gender makeup of the candidates, an argument bolstered by the fact that the headline reads "Can They Stop Themselves?" You see, we here at Reason are interested in "whether any of the 2016 presidential hopefuls would actually cut government"(again with the headlines!), and so made that the visual emphasis.
But how did we select the candidates? As the person who made the final call, I can exclusively reveal that we included on the cover…the people we think have the biggest chance of becoming the next president. If Greta or Neil Cavuto or anyone else wants to wager with me that the excluded triumvirate of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Bobby Jindal is more likely to produce the GOP nominee than the gaggle of three non-minority white dudes on this cover (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul), then just name that Bitcoin amount, sister.
Until then, I'm looking forward to On the Record's Carson/Fiorina week. After all, there's so much catching up to do!
