Posted by
The Patriot on Wednesday, January 09, 2008 10:19:11 AM
Two days ago, Hillary was dead in the water, right? Today, the morning after the New Hampshire primary, Clinton-stein is alive! Mitt Romney, according to the press, is on his last legs...body is dead but the head doesn't know it yet. Right? Only if you take media reports at face value. (And if you do, please surrender your passport, driver's license, car keys, firearms, trouser belt, and sharp kitchen implements and report to the nearest padded room.)
I keep hearing media outlets throwing out the percentages of the votes from the early primaries and caucuses...as if they mean anything at all. Prepare to be educated. What is key in the primary process is not voting percentages, but delegates. These are the delegates who will vote for their candidate at the party nominating conventions later this year. Now I will tell you that percentages of the vote do determine how many delegates each candidate receives, but various state laws and party rules prevent any direct extrapolation of vote percentages to delegates earned. The number of delegates is the bottom line, but the media is all about generating excitement.
I'm not saying at all that momentum does not count. Of course it does, and that is actually the point. With 24/7 media coverage of these campaigns, if NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, AP, Reuters, and the Drudge Report say candidate X has momentum...then he does (OK, well maybe not CBS). When they decide to report candidate X has great momentum because they got eleven votes in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, they are at best being disingenuous. At worst, they are misrepresenting the facts (plain English translation=lying).
Hillary is a big winner this morning, right? Today she has 24 pledged delegates for the Democratic nominating convention. Barack Obama has 25. John Edwards has 18. The Democrats will send a total of 4,367 total delegates to their August convention in Denver. If you're ready to call this race anything but wide open at this point, see my earlier commentary about the padded room.
Same goes for the Republicans. The media this morning are preparing Mitt Romney's autopsy. He has 24 delegates pledged to vote for him at the Republican convention. Mike Huckabee has 18, while this morning's media darling John McCain has 10. Fred Thompson has only four less than McCain. One of them must take 1,191 delegates to the Republican convention to win the party's nomination. Turn on CNN and you would never know that Romney is the Republican leader today.
Would you call a football game when one team had a four-point lead in the first quarter? I didn't think so. This is where sportscasters actually have the edge on "real journalists." We would be shocked to hear Al Michaels watch a football team go
three-and-out on their first possession and say the game is lost. He knows that after only one first quarter drive, there's a lot of football left to play. He knows that if he's wrong, he winds up looking the idiot. The other key difference is that even if he said it, it wouldn't affect the outcome (and I don't think he'd want to, either. I'm not so sure about the news media).
Monday Night Football reporting the elections? Now there's an idea...