People sometimes criticize pundits for behaving as if elections were all about them. But Chris Matthews of MSNBC had a special treat last night: he was told, on his own network, that last night’s upset decision in New Hampshire really was all about him. Air America’s Rachel Maddow told him that posters at Talking Points Memo were citing resentment of Matthews, by name, as a driving force in the vote for Hillary Clinton. “People feel that the media is piling on Clinton.”
Piling on? Where would they get that idea? Because analysts and writers had spent several days in a frenzy over Clinton’s “implosion,” saying that she might drop out of the race at any minute, that the money would dry up, that heads would roll, that she and her husband had fumbled her comeback attempt? Because they were convinced that Barack Obama would win big–double digits? triple digits?–and an NBC reporter said that it was hard to be objective about him? Did that seem like piling on?
Well, last night, whether they were voting for Hillary or against Matthews, the voters left the pundits with a lot more to chew over and overreact to all over again. Was it, as CNN’s Soledad O’Brien called it, Clinton’s “almost crying”? Did the media push sympathies to Clinton? Did the blowout predictions drive independents to McCain? Did New Hampshirites refuse to let Iowa call the shots for them? Did voters lie to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a black man?
It took a while before anyone in the TV studios started asking, though. For an hour or more after the polls closed, the Democratic numbers, showing a 2 or 3 point edge for Clinton, just sat there, in the corner of the screen, largely uncommented on, while the crews analyzed the GOP contest. What was there to say? The numbers didn’t fit the script! Everyone knew they’d turn for Obama! Clearly we just needed to wait until this blip worked itself out! To be fair, Matthews was one of the first to acknowledge, a little past 9 p.m. E.T., “We’re not seeing much movement at the margins” in the numbers, gingerly poking the elephant, or rather donkey, in the room.
Election nights are a journey from one conventional wisdom to another conventional wisdom, but it must pass through the murky forest of Inconvenient Actual Facts to get there, and last night’s journey was treacherous. Of course, once the panelists had a few minutes to digest the numbers, it was as if the result made perfect sense all along, even if it contradicted every syllable uttered in the media for the past 96 hours. (They even claimed that they were close to the truth all along, Fox contending that its final poll showed the narrowest spread, NBC saying the same for a poll by its affiliate.)
So soon the new CW formed, that naturally–anybody could have seen it coming!–Hillary had been able to reconnect with her base of women voters, who felt she was picked on. Joe Scarborough, MSNBC anchor and former GOP congressman, sounded like a born-again feminist: “I think Gloria Steinem got it dead right.” Said The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, it was about “Boomer women who felt old when younger women were voting for Obama.” Only The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, on MSNBC, looked over a sheaf of exit polls and said, “I don’t think we really understand what happened on the Democratic side tonight.” He is my new hero.
Maybe because they could share blame with the polls–and the campaigns themselves–the cable talking heads were generally jolly about their comeuppance. “We all got caught up in the Obama craziness,” said Laura Ingraham on Fox. (By the way, say what you will about Fox News: on this night of the woman voter, it was the only network I saw with a panel of women pundits–Ingraham, Susan Estrich and Greta Van Susteren–discussing the results.) Lou Dobbs on CNN seemed positively gleeful about it.
It was left to eminence grise Tom Brokaw on MSNBC to deliver a lecture on the pundits’ trigger-happiness, seemingly, and pointedly, directed at Matthews himself. “We don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed and try to stampede and affect the process,” Brokaw said.
But a little later, there was Matthews analyzing Obama’s concession speech, in sweeping terms: “I must say, There was a fatal tone to his speech tonight. I sensed in his speech a true concession. That he lost. … He looked like a man who’s truly been defeated.”
If Obama’s lucky, this just might turn into piling on.