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from:http://dailyhowler.com/dh011008.shtml

Politicians who speak about policy are boring?!?!?!?! Are you all out of your minds!!!!

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ANNOYING THE PALACE! Gail Collins, stuck in the Trobriand Islands, once again finds herself bored: // link // print // previous // next //
THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2008

THE MATTHEWS EFFECT: Yesterday, Chris Matthews topped even himself for sheer irresponsibility. By 8:30 A.M., he was already on MSNBC’s air, insisting that “ten to fifteen percent” of New Hampshire’s Democratic voters had “lied” to pollsters, for racial reasons. As usual, it was abundantly clear that Matthews didn’t know what the Sam Hill he was talking about. But then, he almost never does. Incredibly, this is a man who still believed, just three weeks ago, that Barack Obama’s mother and maternal grandmother had been “Islamic” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 12/21/07).

It’s hard to know less than Chris typically does. Presumably, that’s why Jack Welch came to love him.

Many people have worked, down through the years, to address problems of racial understanding. In 1968, our greatest moral genius gave his life in this struggle. So it’s stunning to see a man like Matthews move so quickly to play with race, in part to distract from the public butt-whipping he himself took after Tuesday’s election. (In our view, Rachel Maddow became Human Being of the Year Tuesday night. Just click here; we’ll discuss this tomorrow.) Long ago, another man whose name was Welch addressed Joe McCarthy, Matthews’ cultural heir, finally asking if, at long last, he had no sense of decency. Yesterday afternoon, we thought of that Welch—and of Tail-gunner Joe—when we watched the tape of Matthews. And we thought of our greatest moral genius.

 

What happened in the New Hampshire polling? More precisely, did Tuesday’s winds of change blow “the Bradley effect” through the state? It’s very hard to answer such questions, but for those who want to know how such polling matters work, Andrew Kohut reports, in today’s New York Times, on the 1989 New York mayoral race involving David Dinkins. This campaign has often been cited as an example of the Bradley effect; Kohut, who conducted the polling for Gallup that year, says this wasn’t the problem. Why did he get the polling wrong? “I concluded, eventually, that I got it wrong not so much because respondents were lying to our interviewers but because poorer, less well-educated voters were less likely to agree to answer our questions,” Kohut writes in his column.

Kohut isn’t saying that race played no role in that election. He is largely denying the Bradley effect, in which voters lie to pollsters about how they’ll vote. Will “race” play a role in this year’s Dem primaries? Of course it will, in various ways, many of them glorious, positive. But if you want to ponder how these matters really work, we’ll advise you to read Kohut’s column.

Matthews ran as fast as he could to accuse large numbers of New Hampshire Dems of lying on account of race. As far as we know, there’s no evidence that anything like that occurred; we’d have to say that, in our view, Matthews’ conjecture makes little real sense. But Matthews is a deeply irresponsible man—a slightly cleaned-up Joseph McCarthy. That’s why Jack Welch so loved this tool’s soul. Three large cheers for Rachel Maddow, who we’ll discuss on the morrow.

RECALLING HIS GENIUS: It might be worth recalling one of Dr. King’s famous sermons. “Everybody can be great,” he said. Then, he explained what he meant:

MARTIN LUTHER KING (2/4/68): Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

At long last, it’s time for Matthews to serve—for starters, by getting off cable.

ANNOYING THE PALACE: Yesterday, Maureen Dowd described the fatuous people who stand around wasting time at her office (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/9/08). (Omigod! We laughed out loud when Glenn Greenwald discussed this passage from Dowd’s column. Click here.) This morning, two other journalists give us a look at life inside this lady’s palace. In one example, the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne describes a colleague who seems annoyed:

DIONNE (1/10/08): Perhaps Hillary [Clinton] played the same trick on her critics that her husband, Bill, did in his epic State of the Union addresses that went on and on about one specific policy after another. Those speeches often got bad reviews but good poll ratings. At one campaign stop last week, as Hillary Clinton droned on learnedly about health care, family and medical leave, and global warming, a colleague in the press section leaned over to dismiss her for offering nothing but "a laundry list of wonkery."

Here again, we’re shown a palace regular, who sneers as they’ve sneered for so many years—sneering as a Big Major Democrat bores them stiff about policy. What Dionne says at the start of this passage is true: Starting in 1995, Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses were often trashed by major pundits, who found them horribly long and boring. But these same addresses got high ratings from the public—from people who actually seemed to care about what was being proposed. Here’s the late Mary McGrory, describing this phenomenon in the Washington Post. McGrory describes the start of the palace revolt which approaches its fourteenth year:

MCGRORY (2/5/95): For President Clinton it was a week of wonders. He found out, with the help of polls and such, that Washington is all wet—not all of the time, maybe, but at critical moments such as his State of the Union address.

His speech, which ran a record 82 minutes, got him a caning from national columnists, including your correspondent. My colleague David Broder was particularly severe, calling the marathon session "a huge missed opportunity." Richard Cohen complained of its "undisciplined length." The general criticism in Washington was that the speech was a dismayingly accurate reflection of Clinton's worst character flaw, an inability to choose.

And guess what? The public loved it. Ate it up, in fact. Didn't turn it off. Stayed to the end. They seemed to be like those Midwesterners of yesterday, the kind who were raised on the loquacious speaking style of politicians such as Hubert Humphrey. They drove hours across the prairies to hear an oration and wanted their money's worth. Anyway, after the speech, the president's approval rating in the Washington Post-ABC poll shot up by nine points. And interviews with voters showed that the things that turned off the professionally opinionated found a welcome in the provinces.

Poor dears! McGrory, Cohen and Broder had trashed Vile Clinton for making them sit through so much desperate tedium. But uh-oh! Despite the public approval for Clinton’s address, the lords and ladies of the palace have never abandoned this posture.

Read rest here:http://dailyhowler.com/dh011008.shtml


And you wonder why I have decided to avoid the traditional media. It's a fucking waste of time.
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