Fooling Ourselves
2012-12-11 - by
Gary’s progressive but he’s also old-fashioned so a year ago when he said, ‘You know, you ought to use Twitter’– he surprised me.
‘I expect,’ I said, ‘Twitter’s too young for my blood.’
‘Use it like an old-fashioned clipping service,’ he said.
Back in the old days, in the dark ages before Facebook and Google News, if you ran a campaign and needed to know what the newspapers were saying about a candidate you had to subscribe to a clipping service and say, Send me every newspaper article that mentions Jesse Helms – then every morning a manila envelope stuffed full of clippings that were two or three days old would arrive in the mail.
Now you can use Twitter like an old-fashioned clipping service. And it’s free. For instance, you can ‘follow’ Under the Dome or Rob Christensen or Joe Klein or David Brooks and a link to whatever they write appears on Twitter.
Last Sunday I read the News & Observer the old-fashioned way, sitting in bed, then meandered over to the office and turned on the computer and up popped a headline in Google News from the Los Angeles Times: Mitt Romney Pollster: Why we thought we would win.
The reporter, interviewing Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, sailed right past the philosophical and got down to brass tacks.
Why, he asked, did Romney’s polls show him winning Colorado and New Hampshire? Why did Romney’s polls show him in a dead-heat in Iowa? Why did Romney feel sure he would win Florida and Virginia?
Mr. Newhouse gave a pretty valid answer. He simply said, I’m not sure.
So much for brass tacks. Maybe the answer is philosophical.
In my world of older white Republican males hardly a soul could imagine Barack Obama winning the election. Men – and women – were certain Obama would lose. Republican pollsters and consultants had their own point of view: Anti-Obama voters, they said, were more intense and more likely to vote than pro-Obama voters. Plus, they’d add, undecided voters always vote against the incumbent. Once, sitting in a meeting, I said, That might not be so on Election Day if undecided voters dislike Romney as much as they dislike Obama – but only one person in the room thought that made any sense at all.
Now, a lot of times, the truth is ambiguous. But a lot of times not seeing the truth has nothing to do with ambiguity – it has to do with eyesight. Republicans didn’t lose because of demographics or Hispanics or Obama’s ground game. It was simpler. We lost, say, Florida and Virginia because we listened to one another and saw an election unfolding before our eyes that bore no resemblance to the election that was unfolding in Richmond and Miami.
Fooling Ourselves
2012-12-11/
Gary’s progressive but he’s also old-fashioned so a year ago when he said, ‘You know, you ought to use Twitter’– he surprised me.
‘I expect,’ I said, ‘Twitter’s too young for my blood.’
‘Use it like an old-fashioned clipping service,’ he said.
Back in the old days, in the dark ages before Facebook and Google News, if you ran a campaign and needed to know what the newspapers were saying about a candidate you had to subscribe to a clipping service and say, Send me every newspaper article that mentions Jesse Helms – then every morning a manila envelope stuffed full of clippings that were two or three days old would arrive in the mail.
Now you can use Twitter like an old-fashioned clipping service. And it’s free. For instance, you can ‘follow’ Under the Dome or Rob Christensen or Joe Klein or David Brooks and a link to whatever they write appears on Twitter.
Last Sunday I read the News & Observer the old-fashioned way, sitting in bed, then meandered over to the office and turned on the computer and up popped a headline in Google News from the Los Angeles Times: Mitt Romney Pollster: Why we thought we would win.
The reporter, interviewing Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, sailed right past the philosophical and got down to brass tacks.
Why, he asked, did Romney’s polls show him winning Colorado and New Hampshire? Why did Romney’s polls show him in a dead-heat in Iowa? Why did Romney feel sure he would win Florida and Virginia?
Mr. Newhouse gave a pretty valid answer. He simply said, I’m not sure.
So much for brass tacks. Maybe the answer is philosophical.
In my world of older white Republican males hardly a soul could imagine Barack Obama winning the election. Men – and women – were certain Obama would lose. Republican pollsters and consultants had their own point of view: Anti-Obama voters, they said, were more intense and more likely to vote than pro-Obama voters. Plus, they’d add, undecided voters always vote against the incumbent. Once, sitting in a meeting, I said, That might not be so on Election Day if undecided voters dislike Romney as much as they dislike Obama – but only one person in the room thought that made any sense at all.
Now, a lot of times, the truth is ambiguous. But a lot of times not seeing the truth has nothing to do with ambiguity – it has to do with eyesight. Republicans didn’t lose because of demographics or Hispanics or Obama’s ground game. It was simpler. We lost, say, Florida and Virginia because we listened to one another and saw an election unfolding before our eyes that bore no resemblance to the election that was unfolding in Richmond and Miami.