Ignorant Media

How long has the post New Hampshire mea-culpa been going on now?

Did you really think anyone has learned anything?

Polls, polls, polls... well the Beltway media types still can't stop thinking about all this like a horse race. They can't get off the conventional wisdom, poll watch. Voters? Oh yeah, them. I bring you Cokie Roberts from Morning Edition.


Or take the ridiculous kerfluffle over the 'race' issue between Obama and Hillary. A reading of the media since she said what she said about Martin Luther King, Jr (a little over a week before his national holiday) and LBJ and civil rights shows that Obama has said nothing to inflame the situation.

And today in Reno, Obama took steps to defuse the whole situation:

“I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this,” Mr. Obama told reporters at a news conference here. “We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness. I expect that other campaigns feel the same way.”

Now, Obama could have responded to the demeaning remarks by Robert Johnson this weekend. The founder of BET dropped strong hints before a Hillary crowd in South Carolina that a young Obama's use of drugs somehow played into the street culture of the Black community. The last Hillary supporter who said something like this had to resign. But Hillary was at the rally and said nothing.

Which, I think, is the reason Obama said this at a hastily-called and rare press conference in Reno:

“If I hear my own supporters engaging in talk that I think is ungenerous or misleading or in some way is unfair, I will speak out forcefully against it,” he said. “I hope the other campaigns take the same approach... We’re all Democrats,” Mr. Obama said. “We all believe in civil rights. We all believe in equal rights. We all believe that regardless of race or gender that people should have equal opportunities.””

And so how did The New York Times play this?

...It was not immediately clear why he called one today, except to be seen as taking the high road heading into a key debate in Nevada on Tuesday with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards.

See, it only has to do with positioning in the HORSE RACE. Nothing more, nothing less.