As I have said before, this year the Dems became a branch of the MSM.
Michael Barone on the State of the Race
BLOGS FOR BUSH
Michael Barone has long been one of my favorite MSM commentators - in a swamp of incompetants and ideologues, he's the voice of reason. Over at US News he's got a long but exceptionally interesting article on where we stand with the election less than two weeks away. I recommend reading the whole thing, but this is the part that really struck me:
'It seems curious that the percentages of the incumbent should rise while the percentages of the challenger have not risen much if at all. As a general proposition, you expect an incumbent's standing to change less, because voters already know much more about him than about his opponent. But that hasn't happened this time.
My tentative explanation is this. Bush's most effective opposition this year has come not from Kerry and the Democrats but from Old Media, the New York Times and the news pages of the Washington Post, along with the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. Old Media gave very heavy coverage to stories that tended to hurt Bush—violence in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the false charges of Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, etc. And during the first eight months of the year Bush did a poor job of making his case.
Then, suddenly, that case was made with maximum effectiveness at the Republican National Convention in New York—by John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, by Zell Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger, by Laura Bush and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself. Bush was able to get his message out unmediated by Old Media. (Fox News Channel had more viewers during the Republican National Convention than any of the old-line broadcast networks.) The message was simple: We need this president to protect the nation. Bush muffed the chance to deliver that message effectively in the first debate. But he made up for it in the second and third debates.'
Emphasis added by me. Mr. Barone does an excellent job here, but he doesn't draw the final conclusion as he should - and you can tell when you read the whole thing that he was just a step away from doing it, but probably drew back out of an overdeveloped sense of caution:
Seeing as the MSM have pretty much carried Kerry's water this whole election cycle - meaning that without the actions of the MSM, it would have been an easy blow-out for President Bush - we must presume that the polls we're seeing also have a large amount of MSM boosterism for Kerry. Mr. Barone says he doesn't think this is true, but to his credit he links to another blogger who does.
My father, among many other talents, is a statistician - meaning a major number cruncher; one thing he has always advised me is that any half-clever pollster can game the results pretty much any way he wants to. My addendum to this view is that while polls can lie, the aggregate of all polls tend to reflect at least the main truth - this is why Real Clear Politics polling aggregate is so invaluable - and as Mr. Barone points out, the trendline in the RCP aggregate has been for a steady lead by President Bush ever since Labor Day.
What does it all mean? Prepare for some pleasant surprises, Republicans. |
