You Want Stupid? I'm Your Man

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11207

You Want Stupid? I'm Your Man
by P.M. Carpenter | Nov 24 2007

snip//

"Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton," wrote the lugubrious Novak, "are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama."

That one line -- and don't you love it?; "agents," like some nefarious, anthropomorphic fog right out of "Casablanca" -- changed the topic and shifted the buzz within the media, and within a nanosecond. Drivers licenses? Illegal immigrants? Obama's humiliation? Poof. Gone. Now, suddenly, the talking heads and scandal-adoring scribblers had something else to chew on.

The dud of a bombshell saved Obama's butt -- and he played the distraction exceptionally.

The commentariat -- uniformly, from what I could tell -- was perplexed at Obama's personal engagement of the substance-lacking scandal. He should let surrogates and aides address it, they chided, and not lower himself into the cesspool of ignominious doings.

But, by putting his own face on the dust-up, the senator cranked it into a whirlwind. He knew exactly what he was doing -- no amateur, this Obama -- and he couldn't have done it better or to greater effect.

His personal intervention added fuel to the subject-changing news cycle, and what's more, his comments reinforced not only his own sagging message about Hillary as "a creature of a discredited Washington establishment" up to its old tricks, but fortuitously piggybacked on John Edwards' gloomy admonitions about our "corrupt political system," now spearheaded on the left, says Edwards, by you-know-who.

The upshot of all this? Barack Obama is now in a neck-and-neck contest with Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Consequently she's been cornered into a head-to-head strategy -- a prospect almost unimaginable before and especially immediately after the Las Vegas debate.

Obama's was one of the slickest tactical pivots I've ever witnessed -- and writing him off a week ago was one of the dumbest things I've ever done.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. P.M. Carpenter might want to re-examine his data here

The claim in this piece is that after (and to some degree as a result of) the brilliant Novak maneuver, "Barack Obama is now in a neck-and-neck contest with Hillary Clinton in Iowa."

Unfortunately, there has only been one published poll of any sort that was taken after the Novak maneuver, and though that poll is not super precise, being the Rasmussen daily national tracking poll, it shows a 7 point decline for Obama in the days following the Novak maneuver.

The author seems to be basing his conclusion on a poll that was published after l'affair Novak, but was conducted the previous week.

The point is not that the Novak business hurt Obama, that is unknown. Not enough information so far to say one way or another.

The point is that the author seems unaware that polls are not conducted the day the results are published, and the suggestion that the Novak maneuver helped Obama is utterly baseless. Factually.

[Lucinda]

2. Thanks for providing the timeline.

:)