The story of a rift between Clinton and her supporters and Obama and his supporters makes a great (and relatively easy) narrative. That’s why, I suspect, I have heard so much about the Clinton/Obama rift in recent days. But I haven’t seen much in the way of hard data to establish how significant this supposed rift is. Certainly the McCain campaign is pushing the narrative because they want to encourage a rift where it exists and create one where it does not. Fair enough, it’s more or less his job to sow discord in the Democratic Party. Maybe the Democrats can start pushing Huckabee and questioning whether McCain is a real Christian or whatever.
But it’s a little annoying to see so much of this story from the news outlets. They have this narrative in mind, they can cherry pick Clinton supporters who don’t want to vote for Obama, then they can speculate endlessly about what Obama “needs to do” to heal the rift. If Obama wins the election, they can either ignore their speculation or pick one olive branch or another as “the reason” why Obama healed the rift. If Obama loses the election, they can tut-tut about how Obama didn’t follow their wise counsel by doing enough to heal the rift. The stories are mostly content-free when you boil them down and untestable.
Speaking of post-election second guessing, Roger Simon has an article up at The Politico entitled Relentless: How Barack Obama Outsmarted Hillary Clinton. Like all of these pieces, the winners are inevitably geniuses and the losers fail to see the obvious — it reminds me of football analysis, where the winning team was brilliant and the losing team was clueless; when often the reality is that both teams were fairly evenly matched and the game was decided by a couple of bounces, inches, or dropped catches. In any event, the article describes a Clinton team that was bloated, overconfident, and not well organized. They frequently lacked a “Plan B,” and Hillary was shielded from critical analysis of the campaign. The Obama campaign, by contrast, had back up plans and, probably most importantly, understood the rules by which delegates were awarded to the candidates.
In my view, what drives a lot of political TV ‘analyses’,including the Clinton/Obama rift, is constant daily polling from many different sources. We can always find one that we approve of or find interesting. For example, at one point according to a certain poll 16% of Clinton supporters wouldn’t vote for Obama,but a more recent polling finds that now 26% of Hillary supporters now vow not to vote for Obama.So we all wait to see what tomorrow’s polling brings..
The polling is assumed to be valid ,so political scavengers go out and try to collect data to support or disprove .And we hear discussion of what they bring forth,along with their particular views.,
The other narrative is that he Democrats aren’t angry enough. I’m confident there was also a narrative ready for if the Democrats become too angry. The Republicans will bitch, moan, scream, and demonize through their convention and the tone will be deemed to have been just right.
It may just be that you have a convention/coronation where we already know who the President and veep will be, and all these media types wandering around looking for a story. Just the downside of having nothing to write about that can pass for ‘news’.
Hillary’s speech evaluation has run the gamut in very short order…from giving a knock-out speech for Obama to unite the Dems to being being ‘too’ good and why wasn’t she the Dem party nominee? And then we have one the latest morning polls showing that McCain has a 2-point lead nationally. What’s real?
These strident Hillary primary voters are putting us on..They’re going to vote for McCain because they suffered a life of sexism? Men of my age (66) know for sure many were unfairly passed over because of gender;so that isn’t a debatable issue.But voting Republican? Let’s be a little rational.