Andrew Sullivan

And by “you people,” of course I mean you, President Obama.

The extended North American/ Anglosphere Twittersphere is agog these days over the latest spectacle put on by Urblogger Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in the days when paper was king and who has spent the past decade blogging, in succession, for (a) himself (b) Time magazine (c) The Atlantic Monthly (d) Tina Brown. Since 2007 Sullivan has been perhaps Barack Obama’s leading gay British Republican supporter; he wrote a 2007 Atlantic cover story explaining why Obama was “necessary” to binding up the nation’s wounds and a 2012 Newsweek cover story asserting that Obama was about to become the most significant U.S. president since Reagan. (“The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure…”) About 6,000 times he has ended blog posts on Obama with the sentence-thing “Know Hope.”

But now comes Sully’s crisis of confidence.

He watched the same debate everyone else did last week; noticed, as many did, that the incumbent had a hard time of things, and then read yesterday’s surprising Pew Center poll, which essentially showed Obama’s support collapsing so rapidly he will soon owe Mitt Romney votes. So yesterday he wrote a blog post asking whether Obama has thrown the election away. Well, not really asking. More like telling:
Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does.
And:
I’ve never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before.
And:
I’m trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it’s hard to see how a president and his party recover.
Yoiks. Almost immediately, Sullivan was anointed with the Triple Crown of fleeting media-spectacle prominence: The top headline on Drudge Report…

A fake “Sully Panic” Twitter account…

Were we really the ones we were waiting for? Or was that just a lie, too?

Readers of the Dish try to explain Jack Layton to an American audience.

No.

Andrew Sullivan considers the fate of Omar Khadr.

Andrew Sullivan isn’t winning a lot of friends by challenging Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on her sexual orientation

Fraction of material on Andrew Sullivan’s “one-man blog” actually generated by the person named Andrew Sullivan: maybe about half, when he’s not on vacation. Reasons presented by one of Andrew Sullivan’s stand-ins for concealing this fact: 1) don’t worry, we’re “marinated in Sullivan’s cerebral juices” (ew); 2) “Bylines would fracture the solitary voice of the blog,” i.e., give readers the wholly correct impression that the editorial enterprise known as “Andrew Sullivan” actually has many employees.

Andrew Sullivan—linking to Joe Klein, who I linked to while linking to Dan Gardner, who was linking to Paul Wells—on the state of play in Washington.