I know it's awfully presumptuous of me to comment on the New Hampshire primary without having first checked out what the Big Pundits have to say about it.
But it looks to me like it's still a four-way race between John Kerry (now unquestionably the "front-runner"), Dr. Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Edwards. Lieberman may be refusing to concede. But it's hard to see how he has much of a shot at this point.
The Big Pundits will probably say New Hampshire was about "electability" and a validation of their preferred story line that Dr. Dean is "angry" and "volatile." They will express their deep concern that Kerry might be a "Massachusetts Democrat" who could turn out to be "another Dukakis." No actual analysis of the 1988 election will be necessary. Big Pundits don't need analysis once they have decided on a comfortable story line.
The Big Pundits will not put much significance on the fact that Kerry, Dean and Clark have all been very critical of the Iraq War, as has Edwards to a lesser degree. Of the previous contenders, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman were both more-or-less cheerleading for Bush's war policies. But, the Big Pundits' clown show will likely tell us that the masses out there, who they've extensively interviewed during their travels in Iowa and New Hampshire, don't even think there's a war going on.
As an example of how far political reporting - not just Big Punditry - has sunk, check out this description of Dean's post-Iowa-caususes speech, which to anyone of average judgment and familiar with the normal usage of words in English is just plain factually wrong and should never have made it past the editor of the Sacramento Bee, a respected political newspaper (from the 01/24/04 print edition): "Dean's infamous Iowa speech - when he ripped off his coat, screeched out the names of a dozen primary states and ended with a guttural yell."
But the Big Pundits won't be wasting their precious screen time criticizing such sloppy reporting. They have better things to do, like repeating their comfortable clichees for the affluent, comfortable audience their advertisers want to target.
3 comments:
on your entry #636, i gave my opinion that it may be true that most Americans don't feel/think/know there's a war going on, precisely becuz the media has hidden it away from their eyes. at the administration's behest. the fact that there is a very large number, so large that no one seems to know for sure what it is, of war-wounded in our VA hospitals....who sees that? who knows about it? after the war was "over" and we had "won" it, it got tucked away where it could be largely forgotten.
That's true - a lot of people don't get very thorough reporting on the war, so that feeling among a lot of people may be real. The problem with the pundits, though, is they don't care about the war, so they look for evidence that no one else does either. I actually hope I'm wrong about that. But I expect to see a lot of shallow commentary misreading polls to say that the war doesn't matter in the election. But it does, very much so. - Bruce
That's the main problem with the Big Pundits -- they make up their story line, then make the facts fit...Hey, that reminds me of someone else!
I listened to a bit of the CNN analysis...Bill Schneider is pretty good at analyzing the exit poll data, but the rest is pretty lame. Kerry got most of the "angry at Bush" vote, most of the anti-war vote, and even did well in the conservative districts.
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