The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism

The GOP's media cocoon

By: Jonathan Martin, Politico.com
November 12, 2012 04:36 AM EST

A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self defeating.

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-time hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believe their problem is even more fundamental.

The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism.

Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she only knew one person who voted for Nixon.

Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically-sealed bubble – except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected.

(More here.)