Max McGuinness on hysteria in New Hampshire
As usual during primary season, everybody has lost their marbles. Maybe it was the weeks and months spent tramping around God-forsaken corn fields in Iowa. But this week has provided a text-book demonstration of the dangers of group think and the moronic desperation of journalists and political hacks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yesterday, Obama was the next President of the United States. Or so some of the most experienced hacks in the business, people like Andrew Sullivan, Bob Shrum, and Dick Morris were confidently predicting – adding the flimsiest of caveats to cover their asses. Yesterday, Hillary's tears showed she had lost it. The Telegraph's Toby Harnden called it her "Ed Muskie moment" on Monday and, clearly marshalling years of journalistic experience, announced: "But you can be certain that tears on the campaign trail are not a good thing." "Hillary's tears rally women voters" and "It was the tears wot won it", chortles the same Telegraph blog today.
Even Bill Clinton more or less conceded defeat on his wife's behalf in New Hampshire before the final results came – which showed she had in fact scored a narrow victory.
Yesterday afternoon, on the political betting site, Tradesports.com, run by an Irishman John Delaney, Obama was being given a more than 70 percent chance of taking the Democratic nomination. Today, he's down to less than 40 percent; Hillary is back up to almost 60 percent and all because she managed to get a couple of thousand extra votes more than him (but an identical number of delegates) in one of the smallest and most isolated states in the Union.
Is this what democracy is about?
You will scour the coverage of the primaries in vain for the merest suggestion that these "elections" are a self-serving racket perpetuated by people who cream their jeans over the latest Rasmussen poll, campaign managers who make fortunes by selling political advertising to themselves, pundits who just want to be seen to back the winning team, and voters so witless and stupid that they'll change their minds en masse just because such and such a candidate did well somewhere else (that's when they're not being openly bribed by the various campaigns). In Iowa, according to the New York Times, Hillary was peddling free DVDs to explain how to vote (duh!) as well as fridge magnets while Obama was offering free baby-sitting.
The entire media is happy to announce that depending on what happens in the first three or four primaries, all the later voting states will probably be irrelevent because "a frontrunner" will gather "unstoppable momentum" or some such bilge.
And the same journo will probably turn around after a few drinks to deliver a pious sermon about the Fourth Estate's essential role in preserving freedom and democracy. At least those funny poll numbers in New Hampshire have revealed how craven and full of it these people really are.
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