IN A 1925 prospectus for the New Yorker, legendary founding editor Harold Ross famously declared that his new magazine was “not for the old lady from Dubuque.” Eighty-eight years later, a publication that once prided itself on being the best, brightest and most sophisticated magazine in America has become something of a provincial old lady itself. Granted, the provincialism is of an inverted sort, centered as it is on the island of Manhattan, but provincial it is nonetheless. This inverted provincialism was perfectly—if inadvertently—summed up in a cartoon by P. C. Vey that appeared in last year’s July 30New Yorker, just as the 2012 presidential campaign was heating up. In the cartoon, a blasé, forty-something couple is sipping wine on a penthouse balcony as the husband tells his wife, “It’s not that I love New York. It’s just that I hate everyplace else.”

The same might be said for many of the New Yorker’s 1.04 million readers. An impressive 85 percent renewal rate makes for a solid subscriber base but also encourages a reader/editor mind-set hovering somewhere between smugness and stasis as the age of the subscriber pool—and many New Yorker writers and editors—steadily inches upward. With an median age of just over fifty-one and an average annual income of about $110,000, the typical New Yorker reader is a relatively affluent, middle-aged urbanite with expensive tastes (or aspirations) that are reflected in upmarket travel, auto, cosmetic, fashion and gadget advertisements. The full-page, back-cover ad for the new iPhone that ran in the same issue as Vey’s telling cartoon says a lot about who these readers are and how they like to think of themselves: it shows a handheld iPhone answering the query, “Am I close to the Central Park Zoo?” For most New Yorker readers, the preferred answer is probably “yes.” Spiritually, if not physically, they want to be Manhattanites; reading the New Yorker sustains them in the illusion that, underneath it all, they really are.

Since Manhattan was the birthplace of the limousine liberal—a term that goes back at least to the mid-1960s, when it was personified by the jet-setting New York City mayor John Lindsay—it should come as no surprise that a magazine catering to real and wannabe Manhattanites also follows a consistently liberal political line. That is exactly what the New Yorker has done while, in an increasingly politicized age, more and more of its pages have been devoted to political rather than cultural subjects. In its first seventy-three years, under its first four editors (Harold Ross, 1925–1951; William Shawn, 1952–1987; Robert Gottlieb, 1987–1992; and Tina Brown, 1992–1998), while drifting steadily leftward, the magazine stopped short of actually endorsing presidential candidates. Even Tina Brown, who modernized the layout of the magazine even as she vulgarized its contents in pursuit of “hot” trends and trivia, and who frequently hobnobbed with Bill and Hillary Clinton, drew the line at a formal endorsement.

But when Brown resigned in 1998 she was succeeded by David Remnick, the first New Yorker editor from a strictly hard-news background. Remnick, a talented foreign correspondent with the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction author, brought more of a newsroom mentality to the magazine. One result of this was the New Yorker’s first-ever presidential endorsement, for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. Then, in 2008 and 2012, Remnick’s New Yorker endorsed Barack Obama. This gives the New Yorker a mixed presidential record of one loss and two wins . . . always backing the Democratic nominee.

All of this must have made Eustace Tilley very happy. Tilley is the dapper, monocle-toting Regency dandy who became the New Yorker trademark after appearing on the cover of its premiere issue on February 21, 1925. While a fictitious character himself, Tilley was inspired by a real one. The artist who drew him, Rea Irvin, based his likeness on a caricature of Count Alfred d’Orsay (1801–1852). The choice was more apt than Irvin could have known. Count Alfred, a darling of Parisian and London café society, was born a century too early to be a limousine liberal, but he was the ultimate coach-and-four liberal, a pampered son of privilege who dabbled in trendy left-wing politics and the arts, ran through fortunes belonging to his wife and mistress, and was one of the foremost “beautiful people” of his time. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be a New Yorker subscriber, an espouser of “progressive” politics and, like David Remnick, an avid fan of Barack Obama.

WHICH BRINGS us back to the 2012 presidential election and the role played in it by the New Yorker. At the request of National Interest editor Robert W. Merry, I agreed to monitor the New Yorker’s election coverage to evaluate it on the basis of depth, accuracy, insight and bias, along the lines of my critiques of Al Jazeera and the Economist, which appeared in the January/February 2012 and September/October 2012 issues of this magazine, respectively. There were more than a few moments when I regretted taking on the assignment. As novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe once characterized it, the writing in the New Yorker is “tautological and litotical when in the serious mode.” This is a rather William F. Buckleyesque way of saying that the stuff tends to be needlessly repetitious and riddled with cutesy understatements, affirmatives expressed by negatives, and assorted stylistic bells and whistles. The New Yorker being the New Yorker, however, the bells and whistles are usually finely tuned, and a lot of lucid, readable commentary manages to slip in amid all the rhetorical frippery.

Certain things were clear from the outset. Anyone in any doubt as to where the New Yorker was placing its bets would have had those doubts allayed as early as June 18 of last year. In its issue of that date, the New Yorker’s feature article, written by Ryan Lizza, its Washington correspondent, was entitled “The Second Term: What would Obama do if reëlected?” Lizza, an intelligent, fluent writer with access to many members of Obama’s inner circle, provided a good potted history of past second-term presidencies and engaged in much informed speculation about what four more years of Obama-Biden might bring. But the strongest impression to emerge from his somewhat “tautological” and “litotical” piece was how little key Obama White House and campaign personnel seemed to be thinking about second-term objectives in their understandable preoccupation with winning in November. In a conversation with senior campaign strategist David Plouffe, for example, Lizza noted that it “took considerable arm-twisting to get Plouffe to think past the details of the daily campaign and consider the long view.” To his credit, Lizza himself was dead-on about the electoral outcome and its likely consequences: “Obama won in 2008 by seven points,” he wrote. “If he manages to win this year, it is likely to be by less than that, which would make him the first President in a hundred and twenty-four years to win a second term by a smaller margin than in his initial election. Whatever a mandate is, Obama won’t have one.”

In a shorter “Talk of the Town” lead item in the July 30 issue, Harvard professor Jill Lepore recounted Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 1994 Senate race against Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts. Kennedy won, 58 percent to 41 percent, after outspending the Romney campaign by more than $4 million in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. In her piece, Lepore, after expending a lot of precious—in both senses of the word—verbiage drawing frivolous analogies with a now-defunct political parlor game once marketed by Parker Brothers, quoted a number of partisan attacks made on Romney’s relationship with Bain Capital without offering an objective analysis of either Romney’s claim to have created thousands of jobs or his opponents’ claims to the contrary. Not much takeaway value here.

The August 6 issue led with a “Talk of the Town” comment by Steve Coll, president of the left-leaning New America Foundation, belittling Romney’s perfunctory but lackluster foreign-policy tour. Much was made of a Romney remark about security preparations for the London Olympics. Innocuous in itself, his suggestion that you can never be sure how effective antiterrorist precautions are until after an event is over had been blown out of shape and out of proportion by the British press. This produced a predictably jingoistic reaction from London mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron and resulted in negative media coverage here at home. A clearly partisan Coll recounted this with relish and made the mock-serious suggestion that the Romney team might have considered “exotic” travel possibilities: “Romney might have visited wounded Syrian refugees in Turkey; he might have gone to southern Tunisia, where the fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze two years ago this December, initiating the Arab Spring.” Not all that funny if meant to be entertaining and not very useful if meant to be serious.

FAR MORE interesting, and a great deal more balanced, was Ryan Lizza’s intelligent, probing profile of Representative Paul Ryan as a rising power among House Republicans. Ryan had not yet surfaced as a major vice presidential contender, but Lizza had already perceived something most Washington—and New York—media had so far missed. “To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November,” he wrote, “the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.” Romney lost but, just as Lizza recognized, Paul Ryan is very much a rising Republican to watch in Congress and in wider party circles. Also in this issue was what may have been a small intimation of the things to come. Later in the campaign cycle, the New Yorker would publish more than one strong proimmigration commentary. Perhaps foreshadowing them was a tiny, single-column ad on page 70 of the August 6 issue peddling the wares of the “Margaret W. Wong Immigration Center,” specializing in “green cards,” “deportation,” “work permits” and “criminal aliens.”

The following week, New Yorker staffer Kalefa Sanneh offered a balanced if occasionally barbed analysis of President Obama’s much-denounced “you didn’t build that” remark and spotted a dawning irony long before most other commentators:

Eight years ago, pro-Bush ads managed to turn John Kerry’s service in Vietnam into a liability. In this year’s cruel twist, the success of Bain Capital has become a Democratic talking point, not a Republican one—a reminder that wealth creation need not be linked, in a straightforward way, to job creation.

Whether or not this is economically true, it certainly proved to be politically valid in the November elections.

Perhaps most revealing of a New Yorker political agenda was a lengthy, disjointed “Critic At Large” piece by the always-verbose Adam Gopnik. Entitled “I, Nephi: Mormonism and its meanings” and allegedly a review of six unrelated books on Mormon themes, this nine-page ramble just happened to focus on some of the more bizarre aspects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and some of the grimmer historical episodes connected with it just as a Mormon was about to be nominated by a major party for the first time. Romney’s belief in a market-driven economy, as interpreted by Gopnik, becomes a Mammon-like extension of Mormon materialism, “the American Gospel of Wealth,” and “the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.” By any standards, a bit of a stretch . . . and, oh, so windy.

A week before the Republican convention in Tampa, New Yorker blogger John Cassidy led the “Talk of the Town” section with a comment entitled “Who Is Mitt Romney?” but mainly devoted to a more hostile look at his now-announced running mate Paul Ryan. Perhaps someone at the New Yorker felt that Ryan Lizza’s earlier, more thoughtful profile of the man who would now be Romney’s running mate needed some more partisan follow-up. Whatever the reason, the Cassidy piece read like talking points the Obama campaign might have given one of its surrogates. A small example: the late Jack Kemp’s Empower America organization, a market-oriented think tank dedicated to economic growth and expanded opportunity, was sneeringly dismissed as a “pressure group.”

By contrast, the same issue contained a “Financial Page” column by James Surowiecki with a soundly reasoned argument for immigration reform to attract educationally and professionally qualified immigrants. As Surowiecki points out:

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, remarkably enough, have called for streamlining the system in similar ways, and John Conyers, a Democrat, and John Chaffetz, a Republican, are sponsoring a recent House bill that would make it easier for small-business owners in the U.S. to get green cards.

A useful, informative piece with no hidden agenda.

Guilt by association was the leitmotif of New Yorker staffer Philip Gourevitch’s lead comment in the September 3 issue’s “Talk of the Town.” In it, he lumped together Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke and conservative-populist Pat Buchanan, as well as vice presidential nominee-designate Paul Ryan and Missouri “legitimate rape” senatorial candidate Todd Akin. He further implied that basic antifraud measures such as requiring voters to show a legal ID at the polls would “effectively disenfranchise millions of eligible voters,” presumably those too lazy or too mentally challenged to bother carrying valid identification. Gourevitch characterizes this as “limiting access to the polls.” On a lighter—and better-written—note, in the same issue New Yorker staffer Michael Shulman relayed some interesting anecdotes, trivia and nuts-and-bolts information on the political role of the teleprompter. Having met one of the teleprompter operators he interviewed and having worked with two of the major speakers he refers to (Ronald Reagan and Rudolph Giuliani), I can testify first-hand to the accuracy of this engaging short feature.

THE SEPTEMBER 10 “Talk of the Town” led with a hasty postmortem of the Republican convention in Tampa written by New Yorker staffer George Packer and revealingly titled, “Just Forget It.” Straining for a metaphor, Packer asserted that “the Convention showcased a Party and an ideology that want to obliterate any memory of what happened in America before Obama’s Presidency—and Tampa embodies the politics of erasure.” According to Packer, the “global economic crisis began in Tampa, and places like it” where “shoddy lending practices” and “Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for profits” created a bursting housing bubble. Never mind that the genesis of much of the housing bubble can be traced to the deliberate efforts of left-leaning lawmakers such as Massachusetts representative Barney Frank who encouraged the faulty lending policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that guaranteed billions of dollars in unsound mortgages to unworthy credit risks. The Packer piece was every bit as forgettable as its title.

In the same issue, the reliable Ryan Lizza had a lengthy “Political Scene” piece entitled “Let’s Be Friends,” which accurately and entertainingly described the “quasi-friendship between Clinton and Obama” the way chroniclers of an earlier age might have depicted the cynical, elaborately choreographed negotiations leading up to a royal marriage between members of rival dynasties. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

Steve Coll’s September 17 “Talk of the Town” piece contrasting the Republican convention in Tampa with the Democratic convention in Charlotte barely lived up to its title: “Conventional Wisdom.” In the midst of much anodyne generalizing, two short passages stood out. The first misleadingly declared: “In Tampa, the faces were overwhelmingly white, not young, and surprisingly impassive. In Charlotte, there was color, youth, and tears.” Actually, given the fact the conventions were directed by media-savvy professionals, what TV viewers saw at both conventions, in the galleries and on the floor, were crowds of men and women of all colors and ages that were occasionally bored but more often moved and enthusiastic about the main speakers . . . not that this proves much of anything one way or the other. Nor did Coll’s assertion that “Obama’s lined face and gray hair said all that was necessary about his education in office.” Aging, yes; education, no. No president in American history physically aged more than Warren G. Harding, who actually died in office. That his physical deterioration was evidence of a high learning curve remains dubious.

Jimmy Carter, another president who seemed to age more than learn while in office, once employed a young Hendrik Hertzberg as a presidential speechwriter. Hertzberg is now a senior political commentator for the New Yorker and has long since shed any pious attributes he might have picked up from his old boss in the White House. Proof positive was his September 24 “Talk of the Town” piece, which was little more than an extended comic riff about who invoked God how many times at the conventions, appropriately entitled “For Heaven’s Sake.” Occasionally amusing, sometimes offensive, it was a rather tired reprise of the sort of thing H. L. Mencken, an unrepentant atheist and talented political reporter, was writing as far back as the 1920s.

Hertzberg showed his talents to better advantage in the aftermath of Obama’s amazingly weak performance in the first presidential debate. Writing in the October 15 issue’s “Talk of the Town” section, he reviewed the “Ungreat Debate,” conceding that Romney was the clear winner and Obama the clear loser. One couldn’t help wondering if he would have described the debate as “ungreat” if things had gone the other way around. As it was, Hertzberg faced the facts, albeit a bit peevishly: “Romney won; and even more, Obama lost, as surely as if he had cancelled the whole damn thing.” Personal preferences aside, his evaluation of the first debate’s impact on the campaign was right on target:

If Obama’s debate performance had been half as strong as Romney’s or Romney’s half as weak as Obama’s, the result might have been a complete collapse not just of the Romney campaign but of the whole Republican project: the House, the Senate, the state legislatures, the fund-raising—everything. That now seems unlikely. . . . now, in deadly earnest, the game is on.

None of the subsequent debates had nearly as much impact, and the New Yorker’s coverage of and commentary on them, and on other day-to-day campaign events, was unremarkable. The next big splash came in the magazine’s joint October 29–November 5 issue, although stylistically it was more of a big thud: an overlong, totally expected, four-page endorsement of Barack Obama. It began with a mock-Proustian invocation of better days gone by, recalling Obama’s first inauguration: “The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat.” From there it was downhill, a mixture of inflated rhetoric and cherry-picked factoids ending with a staggering oversimplification:

The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking version of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.”

This was followed by the confident but as yet unprovable assertion that “a two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life.”

ONE CAN only hope that the New Yorker is right, but it is important to remember that the most accurate elements in its coverage of the campaign were based on sound reporting and cool analysis. Its biggest reverses—such as its complete surprise at Obama’s dismal performance in the first debate—were the result of inflated hopes and wishful thinking. The English humorist Humbert Wolfe wrote of the Fleet Street political reporters and pundits of an earlier age:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

No one would suggest that bribery plays any part in the prejudices and flaws in the New Yorker’s political journalism. But there are far more subtle forms of corruption than bribery. If the New Yorker is guilty of anything it is an editorial smugness bordering on arrogance, an assumption that anyone who disagrees with its chosen approach to economic and social issues is either invincibly ignorant, intellectually dishonest or motivated by greed. This is political Puritanism at its worst and precisely the kind of blind, self-righteous prejudice that the New Yorker professes to abhor when it is practiced by those it disagrees with.

Only when its individual writers approached their subjects with open minds and an absence of groupthink—as in several of the examples cited in this article—did the New Yorker’s coverage of the 2012 campaign achieve a level of excellence worthy of what is often the best-written, best-edited mass-audience magazine in America.

Aram Bakshian Jr., a contributing editor to The National Interest, served as an aide to presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and writes frequently on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.

Image: Pullquote: If the New Yorker is guilty of anything it is . . . an assumption that anyone who disagrees with its chosen approach to economic and social issues is either invincibly ignorant, intellectually dishonest or motivated by greed.Essay Types: Essay