Jay Cost has a post about how the straw poll is not really news. He writes that it's a factor of the media's desire to report something, even when nothing is going on.
All this is certainly true. The problem is that the whole campaign is like this! Perceptions=reality when it comes to electoral politics. Ford lost his reelection bid on his disastrous answer in the second debate with Carter about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. But as Robert Novak reported, the perception that Ford didn't know what he was talking about was totally untrue; Ford in fact was trying to put to rest a controversy over the so-called Sonnenfeldt doctrine. It's not electoral politics, but the Supreme Court decides whole cases on the "appearance" of corruption only.
If the media only covered "real" news, it would only cover actual primary elections where delegates are at stake. Cost obviously doesn't think that, but where's the cutoff for a real news story?
The fact that nothing is going on is precisely the reason why the straw poll attracts media attention, and therefore why it is worth winning. It is not unimportant that Romney won, and it certainly is a boost up for Huckabee. How else is a second-tier candidate like Huckabee going to break out of the pack, at least to some degree?
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1 comment:
With Fred Thompson, Rudy Guilianni, and John McCain absent from the straw poll, I don't think that we can count a win for either candidate in Iowa. I believe the vote would have turned out much differently if the major candidates would have been present and campaigning.
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