Tells Us What We Don't Know

Tuesday night, another woman didn’t listen to the experts. Hillary Clinton got off the canvas after taking a hard punch in Iowa and won the next round in New Hampshire. I don’t care about your interest or affiliation with American politics. You still have to tip your hat to Senator Clinton and her victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night.

Tom Brokaw, the retired news anchor wondered aloud on MSNBC, last night about listening to the “experts.” He said, to Chris Matthews directly and the media in general, that they have to “temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding:

Brokaw made that assessment based upon the fact that the media had all but written the Clinton campaign as crippled, due to the large margin of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa, the apparent disarray of the Clinton team and the polling done on the New Hampshire voters. Yet, when the voters emerged from their vote, the outcome was decidedly different from the predictions. The predictions of the pundits, that is. A closer look at the poll data showed them to be fairly accurate in their estimates.

The American media has based its coverage of national elections, not on what a potential office holder stands for, but the coverage is about the race itself. The reporting is exclusively who is ahead and who is behind. Reporters don’t try to establish the candidates’ policies, but try to catch them in “gotcha” moments of mistakes in what they say or about the events in their private lives. Questions are not focused on foreign policy or the national budget. Candidates are allowed to preach. The candidates talk about "change" as if it were substantive. Reporters dutifully transcribe the message, but not the blueprint. It takes too much effort to pull the curtain away from the wizards. Political coverage is asking how much a candidate spends on their haircut.

I’m sure all the candidates, no matter their political party or how they placed, are taking pleasure in the political pundits' blunder in New Hampshire. Settling in their seats as they head to the next series of events in this long trek to the White House, I’m sure every one of them thinks to themselves with a wry grin, “Gotcha!”