It’s amazing in the first place that an A-list Republican propagandist like Frank Luntz would allow himself to be profiled by a reporter who was not employed by a media outlet owned by one of his clients like, say, Rupert Murdoch. But he did, and the resulting article by Molly Ball in the Atlantic, “The Agony of Frank Luntz,” reveals Luntz to be, as Wonkette put it, “a clueless conservative asshole with the self-awareness of a rock”:

Luntz —- the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America —- has always been a hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can recover.

“I’ve had a headache for six days now, and it doesn’t go away,” he tells me … “I don’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. I’m probably less healthy now than I have ever been in my life.” He’s not sure what to do. He’s still going through the motions — giving speeches, going on television, conducting focus groups, and advising companies and politicians on how best to convey their message.

But beneath the surface, he says, is a roiling turmoil that threatens to consume him.

Yes, Frank Luntz, the embodiment of right-wing unctuousness, is having a crisis of confidence about the fractious American political culture that he, as much as anyone, helped create:

The crisis began, he says, after [the 2012] presidential election, when Luntz became profoundly depressed. For more than a month, he tried to stay occupied, but nothing could keep his attention. Finally, six weeks after the election, during a meeting of his consulting company in Las Vegas, he fell apart. Leaving his employees behind, he flew back to his mansion in Los Angeles, where he stayed for three weeks, barely going outside or talking to anyone.

Wait. Frank Luntz lives in Los Angeles, the bastion of Hollywood elites whom he routinely advises Republican clients to demonize as sick and immoral? That’s bizarre. (And if you’re going to stay inside for three weeks, why do it in Los Angeles where both liberals and conservatives agree that the weather is usually great.)

“I just gave up,” Luntz said. The primary source of his disappointment then was the operatives who ran the Romney campaign. Their fatal mistake, he implied, was not hiring him. “I didn’t work on the campaign,” Luntz said. “It just sucked, as a professional. And it killed me because I realized on Election Day that there’s nothing I can do about it.”

But as days turned into weeks there in the solitude of his L.A. McMansion, Luntz came to realize that his disillusionment went well beyond a handful of incompetent Republican campaign managers in Boston:

“I spend more time with voters than anybody else,” Luntz told Ball. “I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don’t know shit about anything, with the exception of what the American people think.”

Upon reflection and analysis, Luntz came to realize that the source of his disappointment was greater than the Romney-Ryan campaign team — the real source was American people themselves. He suddenly found them to be “contentious and argumentative,” Ball wrote. “They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor.”

Luntz told her, “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them … And they’re picking up their leads from … Washington.”

But haven’t political disagreements always been contentious? Ball asked.

“Not like this,” Luntz told her. “Not like this.” (Really, Frank? Not even in, say, the 1850s?)

So who is to blame for this schism, which Luntz apparently feels is worse even than the divide that led to the Civil War?

Not Frank Luntz, of course! No, he blames Obama, who has been in office five years, for the partisan divide that took Luntz and others, notably Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, 20 years to create, building, of course, upon an infrastructure of race and class hatred constructed in the 1980s by architects of the dark arts like Alex Castellanos, Charlie Black and Lee Atwater.

Ball also reveals that Frank Luntz has been toying with changing careers. “Luntz would also like to break into Hollywood as a consultant,” writes Ball, “but he can’t get his calls returned. He can’t figure it out. He thinks it must be a partisan thing.”

Can’t figure it out, huh? Maybe he should put together a focus group of Hollywood elites and see what they say.

Molly Ball leaves us with this sad image:

When he’s at home in Los Angeles, [HBO’s] “The Newsroom” is the high point of Luntz’s week. He turns off his phone and gets a plate of spaghetti bolognese and a Coke Zero and sits in front of his 85-inch television, alone in his 14,000-square-foot palace.

“That’s as good as it gets for me,” he says.

Boo fucking hoo. Wonkette summed it up:

Hahahahaha, we can’t even. The image of schlubby sad middle-aged bachelor Frank Luntz all alone in his giant L.A. mansion brooding in front of his enormous flat-screen TV while the spaghetti bolognese goes cold and the Coke Zero goes flat might be the height of pathos. Or it would be, if it wasn’t clear from this article that Frank Luntz is still a clueless conservative asshole with the self-awareness of a rock. Frankly, after all he has done to create the poisonous discourse he now decries, we think a lifetime of loneliness is too good for him.