Andrew Sullivan, writing in today’s WSJ’s Opinion Journal, calls erstwhile Talk editor Tina Brown “the Bill Clinton of journalism.” What doomed Talk to failure, Sullivan argues, was Brown’s allegiance to

[…] the crazed cult of contemporaneity, the insistent, relentless outer-directedness of an editor who saw what was hot as always and everywhere preferable to what is true, who believed that an article was nothing unless it had been spun and hyped, who, despite obvious razor intelligence, raw talent and prodigious industry, never seemed to have a view of her own, a politics, a guiding principle, a cause.

No guiding principle? No views of her own? All spin and hype? Okay. But what has this to do with the Clinton presidency, Andrew? What’s the rumpus?

Well, as Sullivan imagines it, the connection works this way: just as Slick Willy was the politician for his time, Tina Brown

was surely the woman for her time — acutely in sync with the delirious daydream of the 1990s and the media vanities it fostered and to which many of us fell victim. She was the Bill Clinton of the magazine trade, riding the news cycles and elite chatter and celebrity boomlets with even more skill and panache than her cultural mentor in the White House. But if you asked yourself of Ms. Brown, as of Mr. Clinton, what exactly did she stand for, what precisely would she fight for, what, beneath all the skill and spin and buzz, was irreducibly her, you’d end up scratching your head.

In the 1990s, the key political word was spin, and the parallel media word was buzz. Mr. Clinton was the master of one; Ms. Brown was the mistress of the other. Between the two of them, the word substance struggled for relevance.

I’m a big fan of Andrew’s, but this strikes me as just plain silly. Not only does the argument unreasonably inflate Brown’s cultural importance, but in doing so it works to dismiss the whole Clinton era as some strange, relativistic hiccup in the space/time continuum of capital “S” Substance. Sullivan casts Clinton himself — the leader of the free world for 8 years, you’ll remember! — as some empty signifier, a “Clinton” that only comes to life once he’s placed into a particular context, a “Clinton” animated solely by environment and contingency.

Sorry, but I don’t buy the argument. It’s a glib dismissal of an entire decade (and the 90s were far more complex than Sullivan allows); and it’s a gross oversimplification of Clinton the man, who — love him or hate him — is more than just the clever-but-empty populist cutout Sullivan makes him out to be here.

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