Hullabaloo

Sunday, December 16, 2007

 
It's Over

by digby

Now we can all relax. Chris Matthews and his panel of Katy Kay, Norah O'Donnell, Dan Rather and Andrew Sullivan just spent the first 20 minutes of his half hour week-end show dissecting how Clinton lost Iowa and New Hampshire. Matthews ended the segment comparing her to "conceited, goody two shoes" Reese Witherspoon in "Election" who nobody can stand.

Although Matthews' reflexive sexism and obsessive focus on "the bitch" works my nerves, I honestly don't care if Hillary wins or loses the nomination. I'm truly not invested in any candidate. But it does annoy me greatly when these gasbags act like voters don't matter. The polls are very close in Iowa right now. Nobody knows who is going to win. in fact, they never know who's going to win that thing.

Here are the polls from the Pew Center, on December 8, 2003:



I wrote about this same phenomenon in the last round of primaries. At this point in that campaign, some people were even suggesting that all but the front runner should just concede now so the party could come together and pool its money to beat the Republicans. For some reason, an awful lot of people are like "the fella who couldn't wait for Christmas" when the primaries come along.

It ain't over til the fat caucus goers vote. At this point all the chattering speculation is just white noise. You can see some trends that might or might not be relevant. And if you're on the ground you can probably sense some mojo that might or might not manifest itself at the caucuses and the voting booth. But one thing you can absolutely count on is that the media blowhards are making shit up to fill airtime and they have absolutely no idea about anything. Right now they are amusing themselves and each other by creating narratives and then claiming "it's how the media will report it" and calling it "the expectations game" as if that's something that exists organically outside their little world of echoing nothingness. (Jamison Foser has an interesting "anatomy of a storyline" this week.)

They're always idiots, but never more than when they are handicapping "the horse race" in the few weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire. Caveat Emptor.


Btw: The panel all agreed that it's a fact that the surge worked politically so nobody cares about Iraq anymore. Damn those polls that say otherwise.


This post is written by digby. For unknown technical reasons, I've been unable to log on to my own name this morning...d

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Dennis Hartley 12/16/2007 09:15:00 AM |