When numbers become narcotics — Mickey Kaus explains
During the election cycle, it always seemed to this observer that the most misinterpreted number used in political analysis was the “wrong track” figure, commented on here — the point being that there was a substantial group of Americans who thought that, among other things, Fallujah should have been blown off the map from 50,000 feet rather than sacrificing a single serviceman. Mickey Kaus also sees some wishful thinking in the interpretation of the numbers by some of the smartest professionals around:
I’ve obsessively sniped at ABC’s The Note for its declaration on August 11 that it was “Kerry’s contest to lose.” This might not seem fair–maybe it was Kerry’s contest to lose and he lost it? Didn’t The Note just guess wrong in a close election? Answer: No! The whole point of ABC’s Note is that its put out by the smartest, most knowledgeable and nuanced political insiders around, which it is. And the whole point of it being “Kerry’s contest to lose” was that these experts were telling us that the underlying dynamic of the campaign favored Kerry because of Bush’s “poisonous job approval, re-elect, and wrong track numbers.”
But we now know that this considered judgment of the smartest, most knowledgeable insiders was wrong–it was Dem wishful-thinking spin. Kerry in fact did pretty well in the final months of the campaign. He won the debates. He didn’t commit many gaffes. He raised tons of money and successfully turned out record numbers of Democratic voters. And he still lost.
Why? Because the underlying dynamic of the campaign didn’t actually favor him at all. It favored Bush, despite the supposedly tell-tale “wrong track numbers.” The economy wasn’t that bad, and voters knew it. Terrorism, and support for Bush on that issue, remained strong. And–we now learn from Edsall and Grimaldi–Bush had a far more sophisticated campaign organization. Democrats were, as an anonymous Dem source put it, “one election cycle behind.’” That’s another underlying reality that made it Bush’s “contest to lose”—exactly the sort of underlying reality political insiders are supposed to know about….
How could brilliant genuine experts like Mark Halperin & Co. get it wrong? Because at some level they were conned by their peers and their Dem campaign sources (who were probably conning themselves) in a way I doubt they could be conned by Republican sources. … And Halperin is known as a relatively non-partisan straight-shooter. What does this tell you about the rest of the press corps?
What it tells us is that hope is a very important, often subconscious, part of the human constitution, one reason that it would be much better for the Old Media types to openly state their biases rather than pretend to correct for them in their reporting.