If you saw this “If I were President” article in the NYT that purported to offer up helpful suggestions from non-pundits and political/media types on how to fix the country, you probably rolled your eyes. Certainly FrankJ and Jon Henke did on Twitter (H/T), and for good reason: as ideas go, said ideas were… ah, largely lacking. And kind of provincial. Gimmicky, even. Certainly mostly a narrow focus.
But that’s not the point of this post. No, the point of this post is to introduce you to who the New York Times consider to be “a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media” – largely because if people just let the New York Times get away with claiming nonsense with a straight face then they’ll never stop doing that.
So: let us look at these twelve supposedly representative Americans (one of which, by the way, is probably actually a Brit):
| Name | Affiliation | Noteworthy because? |
| Michael J Sandel | Liberal | Harvard Professor/HuffPo |
| Sharon Olds | Liberal | “Poet Rebuffs Laura Bush” |
| Andrew Weil | Liberal | Alt-med, likes Obamacare |
| Danny Meyer | Liberal | Obama supporter/restauranteur |
| James Q Wilson | Conservative | Professor/Academic |
| Jennifer Egan | Liberal | Author / Thinks Bush ‘criminal’ |
| Str. Mary Walgenbach | Liberal | Antiwar loon |
| Geoffrey Canada | Liberal | All-right school activist |
| Patricia Ryan Madson | Can’t tell | Improv advocate |
| Stephen Hannock | Kinda Fascist* | Artist |
| James Dyson | Liberal** | Big-government industrialist |
| Neil deGrasse Tyson | Liberal | PETA-friendly astrophysicist |
| *Seriously, read his entry. | ||
| **By our standards (Brit). |
