For the second year in a row the Washington Post is holding its “America’s Next Great Pundit” contest, “a contest aimed at people who’ve read a column in a newspaper or watched a talking head on TV and thought: ‘Hey, I could do that.’ It’s for people who may already regularly voice their opinions — but wouldn’t mind a bigger audience. It’s for people who want to influence the national debate.”
I entered last year and, obviously, did not win.
There are TMV readers who, judging from their eloquent and interesting comments, would make excellent contestants.
This year, about 1,400 people entered. Among them were “people from 43 states and D.C.; students in their late teens and retirees in their 80s; people boasting Washington insider knowledge and people claiming to represent average Americans; devoted Democrats and die-hard Republicans and all political perspectives in between.”
The contest winner gets to claim the title of America’s Next Great Pundit and to sign a three-month contract with The Post to write a weekly column at a rate of $250 per column for a duration of 13 weeks in the Post’s Opinions Lineup that “includes a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, regulars on the national political talk shows and some of the most influential players inside the Beltway.”
It is a tough road, but three entrants have made it to the finals.
Their columns are published today in the Washington Post
The subject of their columns on Elections Day, is—you guessed it—politics and the elections.
They are all good—depending on one’s political leanings some may find one better than the other.
The one I liked most is Lauren Hogan’s “Stop the Insanity”:
It’s more fun to be an extremist. Yet most of our problems won’t be solved unilaterally.
Here is an exerpt:
Others thought so, too. More than 200,000 people attended the Rally to Restore Sanity on Saturday, carrying signs that said “Compromise is not a dirty word” and “My fiance is a Republican and we love reasonable discourse.” No one took a stand against sanity. But there were people in the crowd, in the papers and on TV who continue to rail against sanity, understood as civic — and civil — debate. When Sean Hannity says that Democrats in Congress should be tortured at Guantanamo Bay, or Rachel Maddow calls Bill Clinton the best Republican president ever, they are rewarded by their respective camps.
If you have the time this busy day, please browse through the entries, but, above all, please vote
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.