Pretentious Grammar Lesson

Of all of the TNR writers, I find Jason Zengerle consistently among the most enjoyable, but he deserves to be needled for this one:

If Alex Conant can help it, yes, as this piece the former RNC press secretary wrote for Politico makes clear. But the weird thing about Conant's article attacking David Axelrod is its strained use of the passive voice. To wit:

Axelrod is now a pillar for Barack Obama, but he will likely become a lightning rod for public concern.

The public is naturally leery of Machiavellian advisers inside the White House, yet that’s exactly Axelrod’s function.

[snip]

Axelrod is a ripe target for anyone who wants to raise public concerns about his influence.

[snip]

[G]iven his unequaled influence over Obama and the public’s intuitive unease with such Machiavellian relationships, it should be only a matter of time before he is a public-relations liability for the White House.

I suppose the conventions for this sort of piece necessitate the use of the passive voice, but they're dumb conventions.

As a number of the commentators have pointed out, none of the examples given are passive voice, at least not in the textbook sense of the term. (If there is a well defined colloquial sense of the word, I don't know it.) In its simplest form, passive voice is when the direct object of the verb is flipped to the front of the sentence as though it were the subject, followed by some form of "to be", and then the past participle of the verb. For instance, The oil was purchased. Another (slightly more complicated) example is the second main clause of the first sentence of this post. The performer of the verb, i.e. the subject in the active voice formulation, can also be added to the end of the sentence as the object of the preposition "by", i.e. The oil was purchased by Exxon. The key element is "to be" followed by a past participle, which is absent in all of the examples cited. 

I imagine that Zengerle is just a little off his game because of the celebrating last night.