With the Iowa caucuses rapidly approaching (Jan. 19), and Howard Dean still holding a slim lead there and a large lead in New Hampshire, the media jackals have begun baying for the blood of the frontrunner. You can't have a horse race without at least two horses.
In the NYT, Adam Nagourney reports a "tide of second thoughts" about Dean amongst Iowa Democrats. A Howard Fineman piece on MSNBC says Dean is now in the "danger zone":
Dean's own errors as a candidate and public speaker are well-known, but generally have been rendered harmless by the tactical and strategic skill of his campaign. Until now. For the first time, I'm seeing the Dean Team off its stride, behaving like mere mortals.So:
The media ignores Dean's faults, proclaiming him a high-tech, feisty, outsider political genius, and Dean becomes the front-runner. But then, the media points out his overreliance on the internet, his angry, shoot-from-the-mouth tendencies, and the inexperienced "sophomoric strategizing" of the campaign staff, and now Dean is in the "danger zone".
BTW, both Nagourney and Fineman are projecting John "Botox" Kerry as the beneficiary of Dean's forthcoming collapse, for whatever that's worth.
Jay Rosen of Press Think has written an essay critical of the media's horse race syndrome. He likens it to the "inside baseball" conventional wisdom that prompted Bill James to create a new way of looking at the game:
James was originally a press critic. He came to his ideas via philosophical conflict with the sportswriters' tribe. He thought baseball journalists had a firm grasp on the wrong end of the telescope. They were looking at their subject in a way that shrank it to insignificance, compared to the big picture James saw by tinkering with different measures over longer arcs of time.Read the whole thing, as Glenn Reynolds would say.
Marc
Posted by thynkhard
at 11:16 AM EST
Updated: Friday, 9 January 2004 11:03 AM EST
