Democrats’ “Leon Lett Moment”?
MichaelW on Nov 06 2006 at 4:06 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Media, MichaelW's Page
If you had gone into a coma a couple of weeks ago, and were just awaking now, you would probably believe that the Democrats were the verge of a blow-out victory in the House races, and potential victory in the Senate races, all of which conclude tomorrow. The media has all but handed the elections to the Donkey Party, and the (other) cheering fans have been all too eager to accept the mantle of “Majority Party” once again after a twelve-year hiatus. But what if the assumptions of the “reality based’ community are wrong? Could the showboating of the left lead to a “Leon Lett Moment” for the Democrats on election day?
For those who don’t know, Leon Lett was a two-time Pro-Bowler, who won three Super Bowls as a tackle for the Dallas Cowboys. Lett’s claim on ignominy, however, is based on two of the worst blunders in professional football history, in both of which he was the culprit. The most infamous of these blunders, and the one that stands as metaphor for the Democrats attempted march to electoral victory here, occurred in Super Bowl XXVII in 1993. Lett had recovered a fumble forced by teammate Jim Jeffcoat and was lumbering down the field for a 64 yard touchdown. He only made it 63.
As he rumbled towards the endzone in that special way that only lineman seem to do, Lett began to celebrate, holding the ball out for all to see and slowing his gait in order to, apparently, walk across the goal line untouched, primed to receive the adulation of his fans. Lett’s premature showboating cost him, however, as out of nowhere the man who would not quit, Don Beebe, came racing in to strip the ball from Lett, denying him the touchdown that was a given just a half-step earlier. Lett would have been better off if he had simply tripped at the three-yard line and fell into the endzone. He would have looked stupid, but nowhere near as bad as the fool he looked when subjected to Beebe’s hustle.
When I read the barrage of “reporting” about the coming tidal wave of Democrat election victories, I am reminded of that Leon Lett Moment for some reason. Could the Democrats be in for a big surprise when the results are finally tallied?
Recent polls indicate that Republican candidates are on a surge, with generic Republicans closing the gap in Beebe-like fashion on generic Democrats:
The last three generic polls released by Gallup, ABC News/Washington Post, and Pew Research show Democratic leads of 7%, 6%, and 4%, respectively. These are much closer than the high-teens we saw in last month’s batch of generics. At somewhere between 5 and 6 points, this deficit is manageable for the GOP. While I put little stock in the ability of these national polls to predict the outcome of individual races, I do believe the tightening numbers signify the end of the blue tsunami threat.
Just a few weeks ago, the generic Democrat held a double digit lead, some polls suggesting a difference of more than twenty percent. That momentum shift certainly suggests that Republicans will not get slaughtered in the House races, as previously predicted by partisans the objective media, and probably puts the hopes of a Democrat Senate to rest (although that was never truly likely anyway). But could it mean that the Republicans somehow manage to hold onto both houses of Congress? Is it possible that the Democrats, buoyed by their cheerleaders the mainstream media, have opened themselves up to ignomious rejection at the goal line? We won’t know until (well after?) election day for sure, but from where I sit, the Democrats are showboating on the five-yard line, and the Republicans are closing fast.
Technorati Tags: 2006 Elections, generic polls, tightening race, Leon Lett, Don Beebe, Super Bowl XXVII, media bias, momentum shift
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Is it possible that the Democrats, buoyed by their cheerleaders the mainstream media
You mean the way the MSM was reporting accurately polls taken by the only available independent experts? That’s the cheerleading you’re reffering to? Right? Just checking.
Give me a break, glasnost. You aren’t seriously contending that the MSM has been reporting this election (or any other in my memory) completely straight are you?
Someone pointed out that the polls favoring D’s had too many liberal respondents, the more recent polls being more blanced (and consequently more likely accurate). I don’t know if that’s true, but the point is not a significant change of opinion (which seems unlikely to me), but a change in how the poll was conducted.
However, bot the MSM and many of those conducting polls favor a D victory. There is definitly spin in the MSM on this. The analysis at the Republican site Redstate seems to me to be accurate and consistent. I found that site after relying upon The Horserace Blog leading into the 2004 election, and Horserace got it right (and went on to blog Redstate).
I have to say, I will have fun watching this play out. I do think that Dem’s need to really reconsider their thesis if they don’t make solid gains.
Give me a break, glasnost. You aren’t seriously contending that the MSM has been reporting this election (or any other in my memory) completely straight are you?
Changing the goalposts to the vulnerable-to-a-thousand-cuts “completely straight”, huh?
I think I’d go back to my original question, what MSM cheerleading are you talking about, exactly? If you want to take unsourced potshots without even an example, I will call you on it.
But are they calling it (leaving out “completely”) straight?
Short version: of course I am, and of course they are. I don’t respect conventional wisdom passed from mouth to mouth and thereby anointed: nor do I respect sweeping allegations of malicious intent, the first refuge of the immature. You’re very keen to mock this mentality and narrative on the part of the Kossacks when some of their commenters start breathing a little too heavy about Diebold and electoral fraud: MSM bias is an identical victimization campaign amongst conservatives with minimal or zero basis in reality. That’s my starting point.
Of course, no two, much less two hundred million, people, given a detailed map of events in a political campaign, would agree on how each story should be written, promoted, placed on what page, what is hearsay, what is “false moral equivalence”, and so on and so forth, so perfect objectivity from any netural and a priori basis as impossible as the Angels-On-Heads-of-Pins count.
But the relevant question is, are the MSM “cheerleading” the Democrats, which seems to suggest a systematic campaign to miscontrue factual events in a pro-Democratic way and ignore anti-Democratic events?
Of course not. How, exactly, would the wall-to-wall weeklong MSM coverage of John Kerry’s thoroughly trivial botched joke, count as cheerleading for the Democrats? If anything, it demonstrates the reverse, in black and white.
Yet the MSMliberaltraitor meme floats cheerfully onward.
Um, no. What goalposts?
What “unsourced potshots”? If you are referring to the “cheerleading” comment, maybe you should go back up the post and check out the link (therby making this a “sourced” comment).
When did I assign “malicious intent”? I think that, for the most part, the MSM is just too arrogant to check their biases at the door, and that they are SO SURE that they are right on just about every issue, that they tend to frame and highlight in a way that boosts those who tout the same views. Or, do you just think it is a huge coincidence that bad news about Democrats is quietly swept under the rug (Mollohan who? Rep. Jefferson did what again?).
Bad starting point, glas, ‘cuz I haven’t done that at all. Plus, you misunderstand my problem with the MSM. I think they do as great a disservice to Democrats as coddling parents do to their children. In turn that leaves the electorate (i.e. me) with piss-poor choices to vote for in any given election.
Whatever, glas. Last I checked facts are really facts. When a politician of any stripe makes a false claim, the media should point to the verifiable facts. You see this happen when Republicans are the ones mistating things, but very rarely when Democrats do. In addition, it would be nice if the MSM could justr stick to an either glass half-full or half-empty approach to events such as those in the economy. How is that when the unemployment rate is low, the stock market is booming, and the deficit is rapidly shrinking, the MSM can only find this to be good news when there is a Democrat in office?
And as for the bias being a conservative myth, please do just a teensy bit of research on the subject prior to trying to pass that kind of BS around here. Examples abound, some of which I linked to, and I can provide more evidence of bias than you can possibly digest in any one sitting. Unfortunately, I have found that there are those who simply will not believe media bias exists no matter how many examples are placed in front of them, so I really got tired of trying.
Other than examples already provided? How about the difference between the way accusations of racism were handled when leveled at George Allen and Jim Webb? How about the (seemingly purposeful) distortion of John Kerry’s remarks that caused so much fuss by the NYT?
Do I need to go on?
Seriously, glasnost. That’s some pretty wicked spin. Did you actually read any of those “reports” on Kerry’s remarks? Can you not tell the difference between straight reporting and apologia reporting?
Again, see what I’ve said before about this “meme”.
Well, you did have links. But man, Howard Kurtz’s opinion that journalists are “rooting” for Democrats is as meaningless as Hugh Hewitt’s opinion on the matter when it comes to demonstrating actual bias in actual reporting. To me, that only demonstrates Howard Kurtz pandering to an interest group that has intimidated him. A lot like Mark Halperin.
Everything else you’ve got here is very subjective. When I run a google search on William Jefferson, I find less than zero MSM stories on him, so “swept under the rug” is clearly not literally correct, but instead means “doesn’t get as much coverage as I thought it ought to get.” Huh. Well, I think that the MSM swept the DOD’s posting of nuclear designs on their own public website at the requests of right-wing bloggers, “under the rug”. I think they’ve swept the heavily documented and very important story of the RNC placing millions of repeat-harrassment-calls pretending to be Democratic candidates, giving false directions to voting booths, and telling people falsely that they’re ineligible to vote, under the rug. I think they’re cheerleading for the Republicans. Except, I don’t, personally, but there’s plenty of data points to make the case.
That’s some pretty wicked spin. Did you actually read any of those “reports†on Kerry’s remarks? Can you not tell the difference between straight reporting and apologia reporting?
By apologia reporting, do you reporting Kerry’s initial explanations and later apology for his remarks? Or do you mean the tens of stories about other democrats trashing him for making his statements, about him canceling his campaign appearances, about veterans sounding off about his remarks, and about all the damage it could or could not do to the Democrats? Is that apologia reporting? How on earth could relentless coverage of a politically damaging event for the Democrats be considered cheerleading for them?
I probably haven’t proved anything to you, and you probably haven’t proved anything to me. But here I am, disagreeing that MSM coverage of this campaign has cheerlead the Democrats.
In the name of intellectual honesty, I skipped Webb and Allen because I’m not instantly certain that that the Allen/Webb race was slanted *against* Webb. There may be a case that whatever racism there is in Webb’s past was not gone over in the same depth as racism in Allen’s - but there were no real live unaffiliated people coming forward to tell stories about Webb’s racism. The news media jumped on Webb’s fiction writing scandal plenty hard. And it backfired. There’s a consensus even at places like the Corner that Allen handled his scandals badly. That led them to grow.
So the disparity in coverage, I’d estimate shooting from the hip, had localized, organic, essentially circumstantial reasons to not review the two questions in the same depth. I could see a logical case to disagree, but.. so there is more than one possible way of looking at things. Thus the blog.
And as for the bias being a conservative myth, please do just a teensy bit of research on the subject prior to trying to pass that kind of BS around here. Examples abound, some of which I linked to, and I can provide more evidence of bias than you can possibly digest in any one sitting.
I’m sure I could do the same, all proporting to contradict your case by one hundred percent. If you’re going to toss off general refrences to MSM bias- meaning other than about a specific event or specific report, and other than a specific argument about what the report or event should have said -
I’m going to criticize it. Because I don’t believe it. I’m not surprised you got tired of trying. I’d get tired of trying to convince you that you were wrong… thus, our Mexican standoff. Oh well.