So-called "stunning comeback"

I can barely stand to hear political news coverage by the state-controlled media. For one thing it mainly speaks for corporations and propertied Americans. For another thing, it guards the gates against facts that don't fit the daily military-industrial narrative. And for a third thing, it's wrong about all the important things.

It was disappointing to see my hero Josh Marshall fall into the trap of echoing conventional platitudes about Clinton's "riveting win." Here is a link to TPM reporter Greg Sargent quoting AP on the "major upset" as if that characterization is a fact rather than someone's opinion.

Let's look at the freakin' historical NH poll data from Pollster.com. I'm terrible parsing lots of numbers, eyeball-wise; maybe Big Otis can help sort out these numbers for me. But it looks to me as if Obama, in most polls, was trailing Clinton by a wide margin --- often double digits --- back in November 2007. His numbers started creeping up in December 2007, but he was still a bit behind in most polls. He was even tied with or behind Clinton in a number of polls as late as 2 January 2008.

In actual voting totals, Obama finished only three points behind Clinton, which is well within the margin of error for a properly conducted poll. Now I'm just a simple country editor, but it looks to me as if the real stories are these:

* Obama slowly and steadily closed the gap between him and Clinton in December, and finished in a statistical tie with her for the primary win.

* Something --- the euphoric impact of a real news event on the people polled, the polling organizations, and the mass media, maybe --- skewed multiple polling results between the caucuses and the primary crazily in Obama's favor.

* The entire media establishment (plus non-establishment guys like Josh Marshall) became deranged --- first by all the amped-up Obama buzz out of Iowa, then by all the bizarre Clinton buzz (negative and positive) after Iowa through NH.

I think the Clinton fall from grace and stunning comeback happened mainly in the minds of celebrity journalists and the people who shovel them press handouts. Yes, we may see that Clinton had a late surge in voter support, and there is in fact anecdotal evidence (too lazy to link to it) that some late support was voter reaction against the negative coverage of her after Iowa. Fine: so be it. But the final NH voting totals were right in line with how the polling there had been trending all along! At least that's the way it looks to my dyslexic eyebones.

So the big news, in my view, is that the establishment media and polling organizations completely misreported what was really happening in the run-up to NH. And now they are all covering each other's backs by pretending that some sort of miracle occurred for Ms Clinton. Can't let the rubes see behind the curtain. To me, this "comeback kid" narrative is even less plausible than the fairy tales Mike Huckabee is ridiculed for spinning.

I'll forgive Josh, though: he's a young guy, and overworked.

Late update: I hate Blogger's numbered list and bulleted list styles. They screw up all typography that comes after them. Therefore, my bulleted lists will employ manual asterisks in order to otherwise preserve typographic beauty and legibility.