Crazy Uncle George's Blog
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Thursday, March 6, 2008
Expectations Can Be a Bitch
So it looks like an unreasonable set of expectations produced some "shocks" in the campaign season once again.
Forgive me if, unlike the mainstream media, I can't pretend to be surprised by whichever outcome comes from a state's primary, regardless of which it is. I'd been reading (yeah, I know, I've got to kick that habit in order to be a decent Republican) all these columns that all go something to the effect of "Everybody says that Barack Obama is going to win the Texas and Ohio primaries, but I think Hillary might win, and here's why." The thing is, I never stumbled across a single one of the overwhelming landslide of writings that supposedly were so sure Obama would win. Even more than usual, it seems like the one thing the press and the pundits want most is to say that all the press and the pundits were wrong before. If they make 26 wrong guesses along the way, that's 27 copies of whatever they make that they get to sell. They keep going off and saying "All the reporters and pollsters were wrong and didn't guess this!" on issue after issue, and for some of them, the vast majority of the predictions out there were right, and what the predictions were get conveniently ignored. Expectations have gotten to be so weird this season. Obama has a noticeable lead in Iowa polls going into the caucus, and everybody pretends it's some big surprise that he wins because Hillary's got these expectations of being "inevitable." Hillary takes the same states in Super Tuesday where she'd had commanding leads in the polls (and demographics) for months, and it's the shocker of the ages because there are momentum expectations seeing Obama close a gap in the last few days. John McCain gets treated as a giant victor in Iowa caucuses for finishing fourth with 13% because his campaign had expectations of folding from its financial misadventures from earlier months. And for this Ohio piece, Obama hadn't even gotten within the margin of error for the polls, but nothing sells like shock.
Nothing, perhaps, except for oversimplification. Is anyone else disturbed that SNL is getting treated like the greatest academic source of fact? It's fiction, for Cheney's sake! It's loosely based on things that the writers discerned might be out there from some fuzzy feelings, not some sort of solid, courtroom evidence. Well, I've lived through campaigns with SNL before, and McUsesACane will have to as well. What's ridiculous is that SNL is making claims of reporting unfairly shaping the campaign, while it shapes the campaign only with its even more blatantly dumbed-down caricatures and lack of solid facts. It even took a quasi-bribe from Hillary by getting a ratings boost from her cameo in exchange for supporting her hypothesis that the media is being sexist toward her instead of just being annoyed at the constant phone calls of threats from Howard Wolfson and the gang. This is going to be the playbook for all future campaigns, though, where you have to try to kiss SNL's ass to get your caricature in the way you want it. Was this part of the whole thing back in '04 and, um, '00, if I can call it that? Because I could have sworn that courting SNL was not part of my strategery. But you know what it'll be from now on? It'll be expected.
So now we get back to the page, and the expectations that come along with it. It's the weirdest thing being in this whole area, because you go and set up something useful and whatever, and then it's just sort of expected that you'll have to keep updating it and adding to it to stay current. Well, I don't have any new galleries, although I have plenty of galleries with added pictures. Actually, the Maggie Q, Maeve Quinlan, and T.J. Myers galleries all got enough pictures added to be entire pages. The Izabella Scorupco, Kelly Ripa, Leah Remini, Andrea Parker, and Katharine McPhee galleries all got new pictures, too, but those were all full pages already. I still have a bunch of new pictures to add to the existing galleries, so if you were intent on completely new galleries, then... well, I wouldn't expect anything too soon.