I have been looking at this passage from First Read all day, trying to make sense of it. No dice:
For someone who's poised to raise a considerable amount of money -- and who also is ahead 15 points nationally in a new Newsweek poll (thanks to a large party advantage), as well as in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, according to Quinnipiac surveys -- Obama's week wasn't his best.
No no no no no no no no. Just. Stop. Right. There. On the face of it, there is simply no way that anything which follows this sentence can make any sense as realistic, accurate analysis of the presidential campaign. If the goal of the campaign is to win, and if last week Obama posted a series of poll numbers that showed him with a decisive lead for the first time in months, then there is simply no way that last week was bad for Obama. Contrary to the appraisals of whoever wrote that passage, whatever actually happened last week was demonstrably and factually very good for Obama.
It should be very simple, really. If Obama's poll numbers are down, then whatever just happened was bad for Obama. If Obama's poll numbers are up, then whatever happened was good for Obama. And, if like last week, his numbers are way up, then it was very, very good for Obama:
Last week, Obama took his largest ever lead over McCain. Ipso facto, what happened to Obama last week was very good.
Here is another one, this time from the Washington Post:
In the two weeks since Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, John McCain has demonstrated a knack for driving the daily political debate, forcing his opponent to respond to a challenge to meet in town hall debates, accusing him of being "delusional" about terrorism and saying he flip-flopped on public financing for his campaign.
Really. John McCain is really "driving the daily political debate?" Really? Well, unless McCain goal with the debate was to use it to drive down his own poll numbers, then I am not sure how it can be argued that McCain is driving the debate. Clearly, the only scientific measurements of public opinion on the campaign--aka, polls-indicate that Obama is gaining due to recent campaign events.
About the only way I can make sense of this commentary is the piece today by David Broder, the dean of established media conventional wisdom. In short, Broder likes what McCain has been saying, but didn't like what he has seen lately from Obama. In fact, Broder thinks that Obama is making real mistakes:
But it's also the case that the multiple joint town meetings McCain proposed would be a real service to the public and that suspending the dollar chase for the duration of the campaign, as McCain but not Obama will do, would be a major step toward establishing the credibility of the election process.
By refusing to join McCain in these initiatives in order to protect his own interests, Obama raises an important question: Has he built sufficient trust so that his motives will be accepted by the voters who are only now starting to figure out what makes him tick?
The long and short of it is that established media punditry has liked McCain more than Obama in the last couple of weeks, but the country disagrees. As such, what we are seeing is the fundamental problem with much election analysis: is the punditry trying to describe what is happening, or are they trying to create the reality themselves? Whenever polls numbers and pundits opinions of the campaign move in opposite directions, the answer is clearly the latter. After all, if they were trying to describe and report on the campaign, there would be only one obvious storyline right now: Obama is ahead, his lead is getting bigger, and that is good for him. It isn't sexy, especially for concern trolls who have made a living for decades off telling Democrats how they needed to appeal to David Broder in order to win. It is, however, what is actually happening in the campaign. |
