Media Blew It Again
At the outset, the pundits seemed ticked that their expected story line--an Obama blowout--was failing to materialize.He then documents the "blathering" of the last several months. That includes the death notice for John McCain several months ago and Hillary's death notice just a couple of days ago.
What about those pre-election polls we all based our blather on?
When the cable networks couldn't predict at 8 p.m. that Hillary Clinton would lose, the commentators began wondering if she would declare herself the Comeback Kid--as her husband did 16 years ago--if she lost by "only" a few points.
As the evening dragged on, the commentators had to consider the possibility that Hillary's "showing of vulnerability," as Tom Brokaw put it, might have helped her, and that Bill Clinton might have boosted her chances after all. In other words, that the coverage had missed the point.
This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. Polls giving Barack Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact. The news surrounding the former first lady had been uniformly negative for days. She's done everything wrong, Obama has done everything right. She got too emotional in the diner. People just didn't like her. She campaigned in boring prose and Obama in soaring poetry (to use her analogy). Bill was hurting her. A campaign shake-up was on the way. An era was ending. Some pundits were predicting a 20-point Obama margin.
And then the voters actually went to the polls.
The result: Dewey Defeats Truman.
Yes, the real losers in New Hampshire weren't the candidates that lost but the pompous denizens of television and the print media. And what are they saying tonight? Tim Russert says they are side open races - no front runners. Over at FOX the wingnut "all stars" were conceding it might be a race between Huckabee and McCain. Boy that has to hurt.
