Jay Severin, Delusions of Grandeur

Originally posted at the voice of humility on February 1, 2008.

Yes, on the 30th we saw the corpse that is Rudy finally admit to his corpsehood. On the news a bit, but who cares?

No, Wednesday was a good day because of something else.

It was delicious. Those of you who are not able to receive Boston area radio stations will not get this so I must beg your pardon.

There is a slick talk host from the Boston area, Jay Severin who got his comeuppance yesterday and it was one of my happier days in this bleak winter, a ray of sunshine.

The man has been shilling for Mitt Romney for quite a while now. When Mitt made his "I'm JFK and I won't foist four wives on you," speech to explain why you should vote for him despite his being a Mormon, Jay gushed. He was adamant that this speech had insured, not just helped, but insured the election if not elevation of the Mittster to the presidency.

Well, January 30, 2008 will live as a day of infamy for Jaykind, but pour moi, I shall ever hold it a day of famy. Jay Severin never admits he is wrong because, well, he never feels he is. He did admit it was one of his worst days because the inevitable Mitt lost Florida.

De Tocqueville said, "democracy makes every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him." I would posit that when you add the modern media to democracy, not only are the generations separate, but every second is a new life for many people. Now Jay has very little respect for his groupie audience, but he had to recognize there was little he could spin positively, and though he has not referred back to his seemingly absolute prediction of certain Mittarian conquest, he seemed to be acknowledging that something had gone awry.

This is merely human nature. Rare the fisherman that does not add a few inches to the catch. Of course, the fisherman is not generally broadcasting to a whole region and if his fish has gone into the frying pan and not to the taxidermist, he cannot be gainsaid. Unfortunately, for Jay Severin, we have many of his ex cathedra comments extant where he is happy to let us know of his unfailing brilliance. For example, in a column he wrote in the Boston Herald on December 19, 2007, he told us just how smart he was,

"In 1998 I made what I regard as the easiest prediction of my career: “Hillary Clinton will move to New York, capture a U.S. Senate seat, serve one term, then seek and instantly become the favorite for the Democrat nomination for president.”"

Can anyone doubt his infallible papacy.

Of course he has made other statements, one of which is not a prediction, but more a reflection.

"here is a man who is happy to throw his weight behind, arguably, the Republican front-runner for the presidency, John McCain.
"Character is everything," Mr. Severin said about McCain. "Issues don't mean anything if the man has no character."" This appeared February 24, 2000 in his then hometown paper The Sag Harbor Express' online version. we thus know that we can stake our life on the honor of the "Straight Talker."

Now, I vaguely recall George Orwell remarking about a man being able to change his religion or party but not character. If I am misremembering, I apologize, but most would agree that a lying Democrat would not change into a truthtelling Republican and vice versa upon conversion.

I cannot tell you the shock that occurred when I heard Jay say "John McCain has turned into the dirtiest campaigner in the recent history of American politics. John McCain has pronounced a series of lies about Mitt Romney and I mean flat out lies." Of course, he never mentioned how or when the characterectomy happened to change the man he had so admired.

His ability to consign the past to the memory hole is understandable. He can also distort history in his favor. He shilled shamelessly for the Iraq invasion. In the aftermath, he disowned it. No WMD, no Saddam al Qaeda connection. So going to war was wrong? You have not been paying attention. Jay does not err.

So, how does he dodge the fact that getting into the war was a mistake? He claims that the president of the United States served a valid search warrant based on the UN resolution (not that he has much use otherwise for the UN). Now his contempt for George Bush is constantly proclaimed, but in this case he trusted the man absolutely, conveniently forgetting the niger yellowcake fraud and other lies we were told. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever heard him mention any of the skullduggery that went on to get us into the war. Hey Jay, to be aware is to be alive.

I must ask the question as to the man's mental state. Is he suffering from delusions of grandeur? He makes claims of awards and degrees he does not possess, From boston.com,

''But since journalism began, and up until the time at least that I took my master's degree at Boston University -- and may I add without being obnoxious, up till and including the time that I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism, the highest possible award for writing on the Web -- right up to and including that in 1998, you still had to practice journalism to be a journalist."

That struck several listeners as unlikely. Once I'd heard the claim, I asked the Pulitzer folks to check it out. ''We looked at the records and there is no record of him winning a Pulitzer Prize," says Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers. Nor is there a Pulitzer for excellence in online journalism.

How does Jay explain his assertion?

''What I said was, there is a prize that my editor told me is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism," Severin said in an interview. ''That is a hell of a caveat."

Certainly it would have been if Severin had made it. The problem is, he didn't. I read him his on-air comment.

''I certainly could have been more precise," he conceded. Or more, say, truthful.

Now to the matter of online awards. From 2000 to 2002, Columbia University was the cosponsor for the Online Journalism Awards, awards in no way related to the Pulitzers. According to Tom Regan, executive director of the Online News Association, there is only one annual Online Journalism Award that goes to an individual. It's for commentary. Severin hasn't won that, he said.

It is true that in 2000, the first year for which those awards were given, MSNBC.com won an Online Journalism Award for general excellence ''in collaboration," and Severin was writing columns for the site at the time. But that award ''is for the site as a whole," says Regan.

Severin, however, said that he had been told by Joan Connell, then executive producer for opinions at the site, that the prize he alluded to was for a small group of writers that included him. Connell, who is now with The Nation, says she's not even sure what award Severin has in mind. Asked about Severin's account, she says: ''I don't recall that. The awards we did win tended to be for sitewide excellence and not for the opinion sections."

Interesting, a Google search turns up two mentions of Severin winning a Pulitzer for online journalism. They come in student newspaper articles covering a November 2003 appearance at Boston College. ''Currently, Severin is a featured columnist on MSNBC.com, for which he has won the Pulitzer Prize for online journalism," The Heights reported. Severin ''was the first recipient of Columbia University's Pulitzer Prize for online journalism," the Observer wrote. Both accounts also call him a graduate of Harvard Law School. He is not, Harvard says.

Joelle Pederson, who wrote the story for the Heights, thinks the information about Severin came from the person who introduced him.

Now, where would anyone introducing Jay have gotten the notion that he was a Harvard Law School graduate?

''I have no idea," said Severin. But one quickly occurred to him. As part of an arrangement made by his BU professors, he said, he had sat in on some classes at Harvard Law School, though not as an enrolled student. Perhaps, he said, whoever introduced him had heard him mention those classes on the air and arrived at that conclusion.

I don't know about you, but if I got a Pulitzer (okay, that's months away), I'd know it. There would have been the dinner where I'd have thanked everyone ad nauseam and then it would be up on my wall next to my BU diploma and My Harvard Law sheepskin, which I would also know if I had received them. You've got to admire the chutzpah.

There some things he has said that I can't really tell if they contain any truth. For example, when he spoke at BC in 2001 a campus paper, The Heights ran a story that said "As a young person, Severin was arrested over 50 times while fighting for civil rights."

Now if every white person who claims to have marched with Martin Luther King or for civil rights elsewhere actually did, there would have been no one to refuse to serve black people at the segregated lunch counters. Fifty times is a lot of arrests and for someone who sounds so self absorbed, it makes one wonder. Still, There may have been a demonstration that went by his car while a ticket was being written and he counts that as an arrest and inflated it a lot. I admit that if there were five arrests for his demonstrating for civil rights, I'd be shocked, let alone fifty.

Who knows, Hey, he also claims to have been buddies with Abbie Hoffman. It would not surprise me if he said, "when I was serving as Jimi Hendrix' executor." He even claims to have been at the battle of Grant Park in '68 at the Democratic convention. Who am I to disagree? Did I tell you, I manned an anti aircraft gun defending Pearl Harbor eight years before I was born.

Of course, there is the CAIR controversy where it is told he said "kill all muslims" and he says he meant terrorists. That question has been done to death. Suffice it to say, there is no dearth of antipathy for the other in his voice, judging by his use of terms like raghead.

I've tried to find evidence of his career as a campaign consultant. There is some stuff about it on the internet, but it is not vast. It certainly does not reach the level he brags about. My research powers are not world class. I am willing to go with the Scott Lehigh verdict at least pro tem "The young man known at Vassar as Jimmy Severino is now Jay Severin III. The former B-grade political consultant would have his listeners believe he was once a top-level national strategist." Yeah, that's right, who changes their name to the Third.

Now, all of this may be interesting, but it is not what really got me to thinking. Call me an odd duck, but it is his lack of chivalry that set me off. He has for years been referring in insulting terms to Mrs. Clinton's derriere. I am no fan of the wife of Monica Lewinsky's ex boyfriend and I should be put off by the use of such language, but to tell the truth, if someone had used it once or twice, I might have snickered, but the constant drumbeat wears. Even so, that is not why I am a bit taken aback. Jay Severin is married and a father according to sources and yet he suggestively flirts with most females. He never mentions his wife or acknowledges that he is wed. Even that coarse behavior is not the object of discussion. I think it was on January 10th that he was defending the mocking of the former first posterior by citing all the good and loving relationships he had always had with female family members. He mentioned his mom and sisters. The only person he did not mention was his wife. That is the unchivalrous behavior that is so disconcerting as well as the fact that if your mentioning all the women in your life and leave out the closest, there is an implication of a lie.

Maybe they have some agreement and she accepts the schtick. Shame on her as well in that case, and is that not the same thing a conservative finds reprehensible in the Clintons. Of course, that is what one would think a real conservative would not be part of, trash talking. The terms he constantly uses, lying bitch, crack whore, yeah real conservative values there.

Ah well, the constant harping on how cool he is, how sexually hot he is to women and the entendres (a double entendre might be too complex) make one think as some commenters on blogs have averred that he is all talk. In truth, what he really sounds like is below.



Other sources:

Media Nation

Radio Equalizer

The Truth About Jay Severin

Be assured, this is not an exhaustive list.

The comments on the original post are below:

Black Sea said...

"As a young person, Severin was arrested over 50 times while fighting for civil rights."

I'm surprised we don't yet have a Jay Severin national holiday. His sacrifice in the cause of civil rights is most admirable, especially when one considers that another well-know civil rights advocate, Martin Luther King Jr., was arrested precisely four times. In his entire life. See here.

Say no more, say no more . . . .
5:50 PM
tvoh said...

Sheesh, I never thought of that angle. What a slacker MLK was in comparison. Let him keep his day as long as we can have Jay History Month, or season.
7:14 PM
Black Sea said...

What amazes - and depresses - me is that the sort of absurd self-promotion you describe in the case of Jay Severin so often works, and it does often work.

I realize that we're all naive to one degree or another, but I think that one reason shameless liers get so far in life, is that most of us aren't.

Most people, in discussing their background on a resume or in an interview, try to present themselves in the best possible light, but they don't flat-out lie. This creates the widespread assumption that other "normal" people wouldn't lie about their backgrounds either.

I've seen Donald Trump recently on TV promoting his epic tome, "How to Think Big and Kick Ass." The Donald intimated that in his youth he was quite a professional baseball prospect, but at that time, baseball was too uncertain of a profession, and the money wasn't all that good, so he turned to real estate. (He was also contemplating becoming a major Hollywood film director, but that's another one of his stories.)

Now, I kind of like Donald Trump because he's so obviously full of shit, but I wonder if this is a consensus opinion.
11:38 AM
tvoh said...

In Jay's case, it has more than worked. He does it with amazing confidence.

I've discussed Donald before. (http://tvoh.blogspot.com/2006/11/am-i-missing-something.html) He is Jay Severin on steroids.

On has to admire the chutzpah. Maybe it just takes a microphone or camera to bring out the inner hustler, but I don't think I could do it.

I heard about ten minutes of Jay's show today and he was in mourning for the Mittman. Man, I did not want to get out of the car.
7:31 PM