A Village oracle thinks everyone's waiting for Jeb

Which brings me to Mark Halperin’s latest. Halperin is perhaps the quintessential Villager, a man who exhales conventional wisdom the way the rest of us exhale carbon dioxide. Though he lives in New York, he is a legacy Villager, his father having been an influential foreign policy expert respected by members of both parties. The younger Halperin became a political journalist eventually ascending to the highest levels of the celebrity media hierarchy as a “top political analyst.” Salon’s Alex Pareene granted Halperin the highest honor awarded to a Villager back in 2011 when he named him number one on the annual Political Hack list as the world’s laziest dispenser of conventional wisdom. In bestowing Halperin the first prize, after having been narrowly edged out the previous year by Richard Cohen (who will surely be a contender for something in 2014 for the chapter in his new book called “Ethnic Cleansing for a Better World”) Pareene noted:

He’s still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.

That election cycle featured a brilliant Halperin analysis and forecast about the upcoming presidential race:

I think [Donald Trump is] much more serious about running than you do. He spent a fair amount of time about talking to people working for his campaign. I don’t know why he would have gone through hours and hours of meetings if it were all just a charade… [H]e, like Sarah Palin, looks at this field and says, this is a field that can be taken down by a strong, late entry. And if you’ve got the ability to manipulate the media as both of them do to an extraordinary extent, you could imagine a scenario of getting in late and riding a populist wave to the Republican nomination. It’s never happened before, but they both have the ability, I think, and they both have the ambition to think about doing it more seriously than you do.

You read that right. The shop steward of the union of Village sages believed that both Sarah Palin and Donald Trump had the ability to ride a “populist wave” to the top of the GOP ticket.