Way back in 2004, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas admitted that "the media ... wants Kerry to win. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic .... There’s going to be this glow about them ... that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points."
Apparently their relationship to Hillary Clinton is slightly different.
5 comments:
I fear a Democratic Party that has no candidate. They will pick somebody, anybody, and then line up a bunch of people to tell voters how wonderful the candidate is, whether they know anything about the candidate, or not.
They have done it twice in my memory, with Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Valerie
Is that worse than Queen Hillary being appointed by acclamation?
By 2004 Evan Thomas was no longer correct. In the 2000 election he estimated that the mainstream media - a concept he absolutely acknowledged - was worth 10-15 points. I thought that was high but within range then. It certainly wasn't any better four years later.
Conservatives think the legacy media is still just as powerful because it has doubled down, become more obvious, and its believers are sunk even deeper in. There are no longer any "Reagan Democrats" to be had. But that is only an impression. There are a lot of easily-influenced folks out there among the young and popularity-driven voters, and Democrats, by their tactics, will always have an initial advantage with such folks. But they are not reliable. If they are not likely to become conservative, neither are they convinced of liberal ideas. They go off the reservation an awful lot. They don't pay attention to NBC or the NYTimes or the Washington Post. The people who write for the online sources they do like may still be influenced by the Olde Guard, but even that is waning. The new order is not sympathetic to conservatives, but neither is it reliable for liberals.
It's mobs and fashions, after all. Odd things happen.
I think AVI has the sense of it. Gore would have won in 2000 if it hadn't been for Ralph Nader and the internet. (Irony that)--Unlike Perot in '92, Nader was pretty much cut out of mainstream media coverage, didn't get in the debates, but the college kids I knew (I was in grad school at the time) were all Naderites, and were using the internet to communicate and set up 'Nader traders' (vote for Nader in a reliably Dem state, so that somebody else could vote for Gore in a battleground state, and Nader still gets his percentage of the vote to get the Federal matching funds)
I think we've seen peak mainstream media.
70,000 people voted for Ralph in Florida. George Bush beat Al Gore by less than 600 votes (even after all the recounts).
I'd much rather see a Hillary Clinton presidency than an Elizabeth Warren presidency. Hillary would simply be a grasping, power-hungry Democrat. Warren is a committed Socialist and devoted Obama-ite. Both would be awful for the country, but I think Clinton would be slightly less awful.
But bear in mind, I'd much sooner see just about anyone else in the White House than either of them. It's a matter of degree between the two of them.
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