You have your own appetite for endless, 24/7 coverage of the news cycle to blame for the proliferation of a whole new class of pundits being labeled "political strategists." Desperate to fill their programming hours with experts, the trio of cable news networks are booking guests — sometimes they're authors, sometimes they're small-time party coordinators — to weigh in on John McCain's age and Barack Obama's elitism, and also on issues of import. In this era, the only thing it really takes to become a "Democratic strategist," a "political analyst," or a "military expert" is a single lower-third Chyron describing you as such. And when in doubt, that's exactly what the control room is willing to do.

This is good for low-level folks with an opinion:

As [deputy director of Young Voter PAC Jane] Fleming Kleeb [who's been labeled a "Democratic strategist"] tells it, this group of make-believe strategists has become something of a pundits club, with participants working together to compensate for each other’s experiential or informational deficiencies.

“There is a small group of us that rely on one another to help each other with talking points,” she says. “Then I have a small group of friends who make sure it’s on message with the Democratic talking points.”

This makes actual experts, who have spent their entire careers inside the political machine, angry:

“I think it’s absurd,” says Ed Rollins, a bona fide strategist who has held high-ranking positions in numerous Republican presidential campaigns. “Everyone calls themselves a strategist. I have been doing this for 40 years, I know most of the players, and I go on these shows and think, ‘Who are these people?’”

“It’s like Noah’s ark. There are a couple of these people, a couple of those people, with no skill and no real analytical ability.”

[...]

“What’s frustrating for people who worked on campaigns is seeing these folks second-guessing decisions every day,” says one Republican strategist who has been a veteran of several presidential campaigns. “It has to be like an astronaut who spent their whole career and life trying to get to space, and you’ve got somebody who has never been there giving you an opinion of what it’s like on the moon.”

This makes the cable news networks appear like they're the go-to place for informed analysis:

“Many of these sort of more junior folks who have sort of made it into the ranks of analyst/commentator/strategist,” says one high-ranking cable news executive, “are only too happy to talk about things they don’t know about. Part of the problem is that because, again, they’re very glib, they’re good on TV. And if you ask someone the question and they give you a good-sounding answer, you might not know by asking them that it’s not their area of expertise.”

This also makes the cable news networks appear desperate:

“It truly is about availability,” says the cable news executive. “Everyone is always interested in having a wide spectrum of guests, whether that’s a woman or people of color, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s the reason. The principal reason is the amount of hours to fill.” [Ed: See this item]

And gives junior cable news bookers an inordinate amount of power:

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, sees this incidentally elevating the position of the TV booker in the modern cable news culture.

“That is often a young person who is told by the show producer, ‘We are going to talk about X; we need some people who can talk about that. Find some people,’ says Rosenstiel. “And the bookers tend to watch other shows, so if they see somebody who is interesting or provocative, they think those people would be interesting.”

Betsy Goldman, who worked as a booker and producer for CNN and MSNBC from 1988 to 2006, says that, when it came to identifying guests, she “never paid attention to it. I would just put ‘strategist’ or ‘consultant.’”

And makes the folks wrongly labeled as experts feel guilty:

Recently, CNN contributor Amy Holmes was filling in as a guest co-host for Glenn Beck’s “Headline News” show. Before Holmes was a “CNN political analyst,” she was often labeled by the network as a “Republican strategist,” even though her only experience working for a politician was in the role of speechwriter for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Holmes got her big TV break during the 2000 election, when MSNBC invited her on to talk shop alongside Chris Matthews, Brian Williams and Paul Begala.

“You’re just learning as you go along,” Holmes recalls of her maiden voyage into campaign coverage. “Who ever knew about chads and hanging chads? I had not worked on campaigns, so I did not have that knowledge.”

Holmes doesn’t claim to be a strategist, and she says that she has been talking with CNN recently about her TV classification, concerned that the “Republican strategist” label gives her audience the wrong impression about her background.

“If it has happened, it is by accident,” says Feist, “because I don’t consider her to be a political strategist, and we don’t describe Amy Holmes as a political strategist.”

[Politico]