Glenn Reynolds: 'The New York Times' deploys 'stray voltage' Too many topics expose Obama's domestic and foreign policy failures, so the 'Times' is playing distract the plebs.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a front-page editorial — its first since 1920 — on the subject of gun control. This led Jonah Goldberg to comment:

“The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on.”

So is the Times editorializing now because gun control is more important than Pearl Harbor? Or because Obama is in trouble? Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about. So the editorial board of the Times has pulled out all the stops to ensure that we talk about gun control instead. Gun control isn’t a great issue for the Democrats, but it’s better than all those other topics of discussion, and the expected angry response from the gun-rights community will ensure that people aren’t talking about topics that make the White House look bad.

This approach — basically, trolling the public — is a variation on a tactic that Obama advisor David Plouffe calls ”stray voltage,” about which CBS’s John Dickerson commented, “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama's journey in office.”

It’s cynical when Obama does it. It’s probably more cynical when the Times editorial board does it. And it’ll work, for a while, diverting several news cycles to talk of gun control, further inflaming and dividing the nation, but for all that, helping Obama and Hillary ignore issues they’d rather not talk about.

The problem is, ignoring those issues doesn’t make them go away. Obama’s Middle East policy is still a miserable failure. Putin is still running wild. America’s security from terrorism has seldom looked worse — in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, we at least thought the people in charge were serious — and life for ordinary Americans isn’t going especially well.

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It’s supposed to be the function of a free press to resist politicians’ efforts to duck important issues, not to help politicians duck important issues. But, as Jonah Goldberg also noted, the Times' dramatic gesture is really a sign of weakness: “It shows you how desperate and frustrated the editors — and liberals generally — are with the fact that this country doesn’t agree with them on guns. It also shows that the ‘national conversation’ most Americans want has more to do with Islamist terrorism and less to do with the alleged 'gun show loophole.' This alone doesn’t make the Times’ views or their arguments illegitimate or invalid. But it does illustrate how unpersuasive they are to much of the public. ... What’s true for lawyers is also true for newspapers: When you’re shouting and pounding the table, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.”

Perhaps if the Times — and the politicians it carries water for — were more serious about addressing this administration’s many failures instead of distracting from them, the hand-waving wouldn’t be needed.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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