Pundits are choking on humble pie

[Manix]

Peter Preston
Monday February 16, 2004
The Guardian


<snip>


It's a mere two months since Al Gore, the nearliest man who might have been president, staked what was left of his reputation and political future on endorsing Dean. No great gamble, maybe; at least not at the time. The former governor was almost out of sight then, king of fundraising, monarch of the polls. Al could read the writing on the wall.

Nobody washed the wall down for weeks afterwards, either. Dean started January in a state of high-pundit sanctification. He was "unstoppable". The race for the Democratic nomination was deemed "over before it began". His Vermont insurgency, blogging brilliantly, had raised $40m; a no-hoper like John Kerry had stalled at $2m and was having to dip $6m into his wife's bottom drawer to keep going. Jimmy Carter borrowed Gore's welcome mat and rolled it out for Dean.

This pie, you see, does not slip down easily. Its crust is charred on a bonfire of media vanities. So many experts - from statesmen to scribblers - got it wrong. Nobody got it right. Why on earth should we suppose that the gang (currently wondering whether electability is quite Kerry's forte) are back on omniscient form now?


<snip>


Pundits taking a lofty view can always cancel and forget their last pronouncement. Kerry may go from hero to zero to hero and back again in a few weeks. Bush may still be the bet where the smart cash lies. But this is never quite the way it feels on the inside, behind closed White House doors.

There, poll ratings in the upper 40s are as low as they've ever been. There, the jobless figures stubbornly refuse to get better and the awful carnage of Iraq grows worse. There, perhaps, you can smell the panic. Did intelligence get it wrong on WMD? Do what you vowed not to do: set up an inquiry. Does anybody care about Bush's missing year in the National Guard? Do what you vowed not to do: release a mound of paperwork. Halliburton suddenly begins its own TV ad campaign, 30-second slots proclaiming: "We are serving our troops because of what we know, not who we know".

And the lesson of Dean comes back to bite the Bush brigade. Forty million dollars couldn't do it for Dean. Cash was no help to him when the tide had turned. Why should cash - the mountains of it already piled high - be of any more use to the Republicans this year if they've worn out their welcome? Why should golden opinions from Fox News not turn to dross, just as the sheen was savagely wiped from Dean in a few crude clips? Where the devil is Osama bin Laden anyway - and is the choice of New York for a coronation convention as smart as it seemed when the hall was booked?



The Guardian

[emanymton]

1. If a Week In Politics Is A Long Time ...

what are months?

It is too early to write the shrub junta off. The situation is ripe for the junta to contact the Isreali Secret Services to contract for a Palistinian "terrorist" attack in the USA to occur in June.

Then they bring Osama bin Laden out from Guantanamo set him up in a spider hole to be presented in October. And ...

you write the rest.

Bush Lied, People Died.