Obama’s Team A Little Overconfident?
Not his campaign team, but his media cheerleaders:
At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.
A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.
“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”
Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.”
“Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz wrote. “We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.”
Is Obama a certain victor tomorrow? Yes, in my opinion…but I’m a blogger, not a major news outlet (Slate, of course, is an opinion site and can call the election right now, just as I have). It’s a little silly to see networks rushing to call the election for Obama before the first election day ballot is cast – and it shows once again that it is damn near indisputable that there is a quite substantial pro-Obama bias in the media – not every outlet, not every reporter, but enough that it is transparent to even a five-year-old…
UPDATE 10:50 p.m.: I don’t really have a place to put this, so I’ll just tag it at the bottom here and hijack my own thread – but Mickey Kaus is quite good on why a Kerry victory in 2004 would have meant disaster for the Democrats in 2008…
No no no no no. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The problem here is that the media have such a pro-horse race bias that they still insist there’s a reasonable probability McCain might win this election. There isn’t. Unless you completely mistrust polls – and there’s no real scientific, statistical, or mathematical reason to doubt the general consensus of all this polling – there is no rational argument to be made that McCain stands any significant chance of winning this election. Saying “Obama is up by 5-10 in every single major national poll, and is up by large margins in more than enough states to win 270 Electoral Votes, but we still think McCain has a good shot” is not an Obama bias under any rational definition of the word.
Anyone with an IQ above 12 could call this election right now with near-certainty. That you want the media to be even more idiotic than they already are is not a mark against them.
This is bigger than Obama and McCain
Ryan, I’m not going to convince you now if I haven’t already – it’s a bit late, with the election returns confirming an Obama landslide…