About Overheated Political Reporting

I kind of stole that phrase from Howard Kurtz's column in today's Washington Post. He reviews television for The Post.

There is little sign that this behavior is going to change. No newspaper will run a correction saying, "The Daily Blab incorrectly reported in July that Sen. John McCain's campaign lacked a pulse, despite an absence of medical evidence." No anchor will read a statement saying, "We regret our unseemly rush to judgment about Hillary Clinton's chances." The news business corrects inaccurate titles and mangled quotes, but rarely overheated reporting.

The column catalogs how and why the press hyped the presidential campaign. I call it a hoot and a good accompaniment to the other things I read this morning.

George Will does show some good sense in his column about the race being a marathon, but mostly in his conclusion and not the road taken.

A marathon would reveal almost everything relevant about the candidates. If, afterward, either party suffers buyers' remorse, the buyers will have no one to blame.

Which plays well with E.J. Dionne's column with its chagrin about his overheated reporting and which offers this apology:

Just to be straight up about it, I have never been so certain and so wrong in many years of watching elections, anticipating as I did a solid Obama victory here. It's little comfort that the Clinton camp was surprised, too, as some in its ranks candidly acknowledged.

Dionne offers the following warning about Clinton and Obama

Yet New Hampshire does not make Clinton's problems disappear. There are many voters, even in Democratic primaries, who want to move beyond the 1990s and have doubts about her. She found a voice in New Hampshire that can win a primary. It's still not clear whether she has a voice that can move a nation.

Obama has the problem that has confronted many idealistic reformers before him: He has a powerful appeal to the young and the well-educated, but he has yet to convince the less affluent that his crusade is for them. "A lot of people are being motivated by his inspirational talk," Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in an interview at a Clinton event. "But he doesn't really talk about what he'll do."

Robert Novak places all upon the Clintons' (yes, Bill, too) Machiavellian political skills with no hint of popular revulsion at the media's frenzy of bad prophecy or the polling errors. I would almost think that Robert Novak thinks Bill to be the Emperor Palpatine and Hilary to be Anakin Skywalker.

Harold Meyerson's An Old Democratic Fault Line seems to me to take a very hard look at the voting data. He gives little credit to Hilary's tearing up on television as hard work:

Over the past week, Clinton showed a keen eye (not just a damp one) for the economically anxious. In Saturday's debate, she was the only candidate to bring up the sharply rising unemployment figures, and in one campaign stop after another, she waded into the weeds of proposals that would generate good jobs. Obama spoke brilliantly of changing history, Clinton prosaically but empathetically of providing employment. There was nothing prosaic, however, about her victory.

That sentence jars me. Here I take Will over Meyerson. Why? The victory has drama only because of the media's hype. Hilary lags Obama in candidates. New Hampshire hardly represents the other forty-nine states. The fight is on. Otherwise, Meyerson does have some interesting things to say.

If Harold Meyerson downplayed Hilary's crying for her political sense, Maureen Dowd did not. I must admit here, I just am not getting Maureen Dowd. I once liked reading here but that was before the New York Times made us pay to read her. The headline for her column read Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?. Even more than with Will's column, I found the route to her conclusion a hard one:

Hillary sounded silly trying to paint Obama as a poetic dreamer and herself as a prodigious doer. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she said. Did any living Democrat ever imagine that any other living Democrat would try to win a presidential primary in New Hampshire by comparing herself to L.B.J.? (Who was driven out of politics by Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire.)

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.

At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart was full, she sounded the feminist anthem: “I found my own voice.”