CNN’s poll of debate viewers blares a puzzling headline: “Round 1 in debate goes to Obama, poll says.”
But the poll itself actually doesn’t say that. This is blatant editorializing on the part of CNN. The first problem is the numbers:
Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.
Buried way, way down at the bottom of the story — hopefully, one surmises, past the point where anyone would read — is the following:
The results may be favoring Obama simply because more Democrats than Republicans tuned in to the debate. Of the debate-watchers questioned in this poll, 41 percent of the respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans and 30 percent as independents.
I’m far from being a polling expert, but this is obviously a slanted poll. A 14-point split between Republican and Democrat respondents? And what percentage of those “independents” were leaners for Obama?
That’s bad enough, but the really egregious part is CNN’s blatant reportage of opinion as fact, which allowed the creation of a news story announcing Obama’s victory.
“It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight,” CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. “But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama.”
Oh, so actually the debate was a tie. But according to somebody named Alan Silverleib, a tie means a win for Obama — ergo: “Round 1 in debates goes to Obama, poll says.” But even CNN’s “Senior Political Researcher” says that the poll didn’t say that! The headline should have been written, “Round 1 in debates goes to Obama, Silverleib says.”
And now we can write: Round 1 in the contest to see who’s most in the tank for Obama goes to CNN.
Additionally, there is the problem of at some point defining the context enough to be useful in defining policy. Too often, the intellectual’s delight in “context” leads to an ever ramifying “problem” that sooner or later will beforced to take into account, for instance, lingering disputes from the First World War before one may act in 2009. Talkers like Obama relish on-and-on-and-on, dorm-room-style BS sessions in which nothing is ever agreed to except that the particpants are really, really smart.
“Think carefully..?” Barry, “You’d better not do that if you’ve never done it before”.
Is this thought or decision-avoidance?
I think we’re seeing the caution natural to not knowing what he’s doing.
Joe Klein takes over for the “Amazing Kreskin”? He can read Obama’s mind or BHO is sharing his innermost thoughts with him, perhaps by telepathy? That’s an unfair advantage over other, less endowed pundits.
What foreign policy decisions has he made? And does the context Klein refers to with Pakistan include bombing them? Because of all the powerful personalities he has in his administration, and the all the envoys, I suspect over time we will see a very muddled foreign policy. He hasn’t shown the traits of a strong leader able to control strong personalities, and he has no experience whatsoever in sorting through dissenting opinions, drawing out the best ideas, and putting a plan or policy together that is his. He utterly failed on his first attempt (the stimulus) by allowing Pelosi and Reid to control the plan.
What Klein calls “thought before action”, we in the real world call “shilly-shally, dilly-dally and willy nilly.”
We call them this in order to harry barry!
i think it’s fair to say that joe klein did his best, most incisive and durable writing as ‘anonymous’…
…he should return to fiction; it clearly brings out the best in him…
Klein had admitted publicly that his views on foreign policy are a way of acting out his unresolved conflicts with his parents. At least he’s honest about that.
The real problem is that each time I see or hear Obama, he looks like a school boy. I suspect other world leaders sense it too, and Iran/Pakistan/China/Russia etc. will work actively to box Obama/US in.