Sympathy for the Clinton? (Or, our "press corps" momentarily stumbles onto a reality they prefer to ignore)

Hillary Clinton as Chris Matthews sees her in his dreams

I'm not going to pretend to sift through all the various issues about the New Hampshire polling in detail. I mainly want to call attention to a couple of things.

One is that it's nothing that new for polling in primaries to be significantly off. Now I know professional pollsters look at these things in more granular detail. And it does sound like the margins for Obama that the polls were showing as of two days before the vote wound up being further off the mark than usual. But I always assume that polls in primaries are less accurate than polls for the general election.

Why would this be so? Multiple candidates, for one thing. A more unpredictable level of voter participation, for another. In states with "open primaries" where any voter can vote in any party's primary, or in a case like New Hampshire where at least independents can vote in either primary, that adds more unpredictability. And if primaries have more than two significant contenders, as the early Presidential primaries for both parties normally do when there is not an incumbent President running for re-election, prediction becomes more complicated than in the normal general election situation with two candidates.

In the scramble for a new conventional wisdom to explain why the reporters and commentators who focused so heavily on the polling results for the "horse race", it's remarkable to me how many reporters and analysts seem to assume that the polls were right anyway and that something happened on Monday and Tuesday to swing the results. Isn't the most obvious explanation that the polls were just wrong?

Today's lead headline in the San Francisco Chronicle was Why polls in New Hampshire were so far off by Carla Marinucci, a reliable practitioner of the conventional "press corps" wisdom. A more meaningful question would be, why did the press and the punditocracy spend most of their time and reporting energy focusing on "horse race" polling statistics that turned out to be off-base instead of reporting on what the candidates were saying about the issues?

But that would require the press to turn a critical eye on their own typical behavior. And, as Bob Somerby says, the press scrupulously avoids criticizing their own conduct. Except...

One of the things that struck me about Marinucci's report is that the New Hampshire primary has produced a moment - likely brief - in which the press dysfunction became so blatant that even they can't hide their own little society's misconduct and lack of professionalism. Because in looking for the reason that those polls that they still assume were right anyway actually turned out to be wrong on voting day, their favorite emerging explanation seems to be that women voters switched to Clinton at the last minute out of sympathy for her. Which may well be the case, though that in itself wouldn't explain the missed polling predictions. I haven't seen any clear indication of this shift in the demographic breakdown of the vote that I've seen. And it's also not clear that any of the post-vote polling can say whether the supposed sympathy vote was more prevalent among women than men.

But it's taking the press a while to pivot that assumption into a narrative of how the cold, calculating witch-woman Clinton pulled it off with some deeply sinister scheming. And in the meantime, even as conventional a reporter as Marinucci hasn't been able to avoid mentioning just who or what provoked this supposed sympathy vote:

Garry South, a California Democratic political consultant, said that women - who proved crucial to Clinton's big win in New Hampshire - might simply have said "enough is enough" as they watched a parade of cable TV pundits, mostly male, all but pronounce Clinton's White House bid over in the final 48 hours of the campaign.

After the New York senator delivered a rare, emotional statement at a weekend campaign event, her voice nearly breaking, commentators began virtually nonstop analysis, suggesting that Clinton either was in the throes of a near-nervous breakdown or was making a shrewd bid for sympathy, he said.

"I think this is not totally a sisterhood kind of campaign, but women - whether they [w]ill vote for her or not - know (her campaign) is a very historic thing," South said. "And to have her treated in that kind of dismissive way by a bunch of white male buffoon talking heads had women ticked off. My gut feeling is ... they stormed to the polls. Something happened here." (my emphasis)

Again, it's not clear to me that the numbers actually show this effect having created a last-minute swing to Clinton.

But the surprising thing is to see in a front-page article a clear statement that voters could well have been reacting against the conduct of the press corps. Despite the significant role that especially TV news and commentary have in framing the political issues and events in the short run (and often in the not-so-short run), reporters following the accepted conventions know not to talk about their own profession's bad behavior.

And, yet, there it is, right there in Carla Marinucci's report! Someone is quoted as saying - near the top of the article even! - that "a parade of cable TV pundits, mostly male," had "all but pronounce[d] Clinton's White House bid over in the final 48 hours of the campaign". And that Clinton was treated in a "dismissive way by a bunch of white male buffoon talking heads".

It's probably true that none of the Establishment press figures can really compete with Chris Matthews' record over years of just plain weird hostility and obsession with Hillary Clinton. But I'd hate to see this phenomenon shoe-horned into a flabby conventional wisdom that it's just some niche of hormone-troubled women who react against manly men like Chris Matthews criticizing female candidates. Because female voters look at issues in elections as least as closely as male voters do. And neither a male nor female voter would need to consider themselves as particularly feminist-minded to see that much of the mainstream reporting on Clinton is downright demented and unfair. Plus it seems to me than in every Presidential election before this one, it was taken for granted that there was a certain amount of "sympathy for the underdog" factor in voting, especially in primaries, that could throw off polling predictions.

It will take much, much more for the dysfunction of the press to receive the kind of public attention it needs. But this incident does encourage me in one thought I've had for a while about Clinton's value as a Democratic candidate. Which is that unlike Obama and probably more so than Edwards, she's under no illusion about the kind of press hostility and misconduct she's going to face in the general election. She knows that she's going to have to fight the press dementia all along. And it's a good sign that her first primary victory has, even if only for a brief moment, forced the press corps to acknowledge that their own conduct has become a major factor in American politics.

Tags: carla marinucci, chris matthews, establishment press, hillary clinton, mainstream media, mainstream press