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After last week's fiasco, some political pundits are shying away from predicting primary races. But not me!
I began this series of publishing my "picks" knowing there was a chance it would just showcase my foolishness, and now that that's happened once I see no reason not to provide you, the reader, with further amusement at my expense.
Now, you may think me delusional for suggesting this, but perhaps Hillary Clinton's advisers are fans of this column. Maybe she herself was browsing Huffington Post last Friday. You be the judge. The following is the advice I offered Hillary in last week's column:
The whole inevitability thing didn't work out the way it was supposed to. Likewise the electability thing. "Change" may gain ground, now that it's the official buzzword of '08, but the change Clinton really needs to make is in her style. The campaign is now about emotion, and Hillary needs to get back to the point where she was earlier in the contest, when she was actually showing a decent amount of emotion and connecting with her crowds on a personal level. The wonky "I'll be ready on day one," and reciting lists of reasons why she should be nominated needs to change to actually connecting with people emotionally in the final stretch.
In the wake of the New Hampshire primary opinion polling fiasco, everyone is focusing on various reasons the pollsters "got it wrong." In the midst of all this media breastbeating, one fact seems to be escaping a lot of people -- it was the undecided voters who carried the day for Hillary Clinton.
Now, normally I do my fair share of condemning the mainstream media for their stupefyingly obtuse and superficial behavior (to be honest, they make it really easy for me to do so). But on this one, I've got to take the heat with the rest of them. I, too, blew it. I saw the polls, and (while not believing in any single one of them) I did believe in the trend. I thought Barack Obama had it sewn up. Until the results started coming in. As Mark Twain (or maybe it was Disraeli) once said: "There are three types of lie: a lie, a damned lie, and statistics."
Sorry for the short column today, but since New Hampshire is the center of the political universe today, nobody's really paying attention to anything else anyway. If you want something fun to do while watching the returns come in tonight, head over to the McClatchy news site, where they're having a cartoon caption contest.
On the Democratic side, I had Edwards out front by at least 4-5 points, and Obama narrowly squeaking out second from Hillary (essentially a tie for second). Well, I got the names wrong but predicted the race dynamics pretty well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it....
Total for Democratic picks so far: 1 for 3 (I correctly put Hillary in third, at least).
On the Republican side, I did a little better. I had Huckabee by five to ten points, followed by Romney and then McCain far back in third. I almost swept this one, but in the end Thompson edged out McCain for the third place spot. I still called the margins of victory pretty accurately, though, so I feel good about that.
Total for Republican picks so far: 2 for 3.
Total overall picks: 3 for 6.
Well, it looks like I owe some young folks an apology. To the youth of Iowa: Sorry!
I've been predicting for a while now that counting on "new voters" is a mistake for the campaigns, because they just never actually show up on election day. Whoops! Democrats in Iowa turned out to the caucuses in droves -- almost doubling the previous attendance records. And an enormous amount of them were young people and other first-timers, who mostly voted for Obama.
Tomorrow's Iowa caucuses are certainly reaping a bumper crop of blather in the news. Pundits everywhere are weighing in on every aspect of both the Democratic and Republican race to the nomination. But I've noticed something -- in all the verbiage spewed about what is or is not going to happen tomorrow, there are very few willing to actually call the results of the race. Language is hedged, scenarios are spun out as "what if" speculation, but not a whole lot of people are willing to stand up and say "this is how I think it'll turn out."
Which is a shame. If political writers (both professional and amateur) aren't willing to run the risk of being wrong (and looking foolish), then what are they in the prognostication business for anyway? After all, every two-bit local news sportscaster is willing to tell you his picks for the outcome of each week's football games, why shouldn't our national political press be just as willing to do the same?
OK, here we go with Part 2 of my annual McLaughlin Awards. Last week's column covered the first half of these awards.
Unfortunately (as of this writing) the transcript for last week's McLaughlin Group is not yet available on their website, so you'll have to check it later to compare how I did with the actual McLaughlin Group themselves.
While predicting the future of the Democratic Party is usually a futile exercise due to the inherent "herding cats" nature of the party, predicting the future of the Republican Party is usually pretty easy to do. So easy, it's boring. Which is why I normally shy away from the subject.
But 2008 is going to be a watershed year for the Republican Party, because they seem to be having their own set of factionalist problems. Which means the fortunes of the GOP will be a lot more interesting than usual next year.