Regardless of who wins on Tuesday, Debra Saunders points out the biggest loser of all in this interminable campaign season: “Conventional Wisdom“.
The biggest loser in this 2008 election is obvious even before the first vote has been counted: conventional wisdom. Remember last year when Hillary Rodham Clinton was considered the shoo-in for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, after which she was supposed to waltz into the Oval Office? Also in 2007, Beltway pundits had written off John McCain’s chances of winning the GOP primary because McCain had angered his party’s base by pushing an immigration bill that extended the path to citizenship to illegal immigrants. The knowitalli had crowned former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney the sure thing — or, in fey moments, erstwhile New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. They wrote off McCain as a “dead man walking.”
The great thing about covering politics is that you continually learn new things about the American people. And no matter what pundits — yes, including me — write in newspapers or assert on cable TV, the voters in the end have their say.
Please, go read the whole thing. Saunders points out many of the weird things that have happened, things that belie the “Conventional Wisdom” of the pundits. (Nor am I saying that I am immune to this, having fallen into the same traps – assuming Hillary Clinton would be the nominee, for one.)
Right now, the media’s “Conventional Wisdom” is that Obama is a shoo-in to win on Tuesday. Given their track record in this election cycle, one has to wonder.
One also has to ask a simple question. How much of the “Conventional Wisdom” being pushed by the press in the waning days of the campaign is meant to deliberately suppress votes against their chosen candidate? How many voters will be discouraged by the nonstop barrage from the firmly-in-the-tank media?
The danger of that media strategy, of course, is obvious. How many of the supporters of the media’s candidate will fail to show up at the polls if they think the election is in the bag?
Sleep well, knowitalli.
I think maybe it’s an example of “whistling past the graveyard”–their figurative “shouting Obama’s gonna win and there’s noting you can do about it” belies their assertion of inevitibility.
We can only hope that most of the Obamessiah’s worshipers stay home!