About Andrew Sullivan

I don’t have any interesting thoughts about Andrew Sullivan leaving his blog, but Galley Friend X emailed in with some:

His “retirement” will spark no shortage of ponderous reflection on the end of blogging—it’s already starting—but isn’t there a much more obvious force driving this?

We’re in the last two years of the Obama Administration, and so of course a number of its journalistic proponents are exhausted. TNR has collapsed, the American Prospect is collapsing, and now Sully’s quitting too. All of them were well energized (and well supported) when they were the loud opponents of a Republican administration. But after six years of a Democratic president, they’ve all lost their mojo. I don’t blame Sully for quitting now—if I were him, I wouldn’t want to spend the next two years defending Obama and promoting Hillary, either.

When this happened eight years ago, it sparked all sorts of discussion (on the Left) of whether conservatives were intellectually “exhausted.” But this time around, when it’s liberal journalists and intellectuals who are exhausted, they’ll turn it into a process story.

In any event, I suspect that Sully’s “retirement” from blogging won’t last more than six months into a Republican presidential administration. Hell, if the polls are close after the Republican convention, Sully’s blog will probably reappear, magically, on a major media website.