Posted by
AmericanMind on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 10:05:39 PM
All the attention was on who would win the GOP primary in South Carolina. Fox News rarely mentioned the Nevada GOP caucus in their coverage this week. Bill O'Reilly, who prides himself on precise prognostication, opened his show Friday with a memo titled "The latest polling out of South Carolina". He talked about how important South Carolina was for the GOP and Nevada was for the Democrats but mentioned nothing about the Nevada GOP caucus.
Many media outlets followed suit, rarely mentioning the Nevada caucus where Romney was leading and focused on South Carolina where the media darling John McCain led with media freak Mike Huckabee a close second. (I'm allowed to call anyone a freak who admits on national television to using a popcorn popper to cook squirrel in their college dorm).
What's going on? We know the spin media loves John McCain but that would only matter in states like New Hampshire where independents can swing an election. In states where Republicans elect the Republican nominee (what a novel idea), spin media matters not. In those states, the voters watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal.
As I mentioned above, FNC rarely mentioned Romney or even the Nevada GOP caucus. Likewise, the front page of the Journal on Saturday did not mention Romney or the Nevada caucus and the headline inside said, South Carolina May Winnow GOP Field. If I was a Nevada Republican, I'd be more than a little pissed off. Despite having more delagates at stake than South Carolina (34 vs 24) the "fair and balanced" media virtually ignored a whole state.
It's hard for me to say, but it really seemed like FNC was trying to minimize Romney's success. They've never referred to Mitt as frontrunner even though he leads in delegates, overall GOP votes and number of states won. How else do you judge who's leading? Aren't votes more important than polling once the primaries begin? Instead, all Fox folk kept saying is "the GOP race is really up in the air" and "there's no clear frontrunner".
If the Boston Red Sox (Romney) were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks (McCain) and scored more runs than Arizona in the 1st inning (WY), fewer runs in 2nd (IA) and 3rd (NH) inning and then knocked a few out of the park in the 4th inning (MI) so the score was now 42 to 32 (wow - that's really bad pitching) you'd never hear the announcer say to the audience at the start of the 5th inning, "Well, it's really hard to say who's in front at this point in the game."
Mitt Romney has, by far, the most GOP delegates going into Super Tuesday.
The new score of GOP delegates will put Romney way out in front with about 66 delegates (WY, MI, NV), McCain way back with 38 delegates (NH, SC) and Huckabee with 26 (IA). Why would anyone on the planet feel McCain has the momentum when Romney has twice as many delegates, has won 3 out of 6 states (with large margins) and came in 2nd in two others? By comparison, McCain has far fewer delegates, only won 2 states with narrow margins. And it's possible Mitt could win Florida because it's pretty even now and Mitt could pick up some momentum if the media recognizes him, rightly, as the frontrunner.
Of course, the next question is why is the media so anti-Romney? It is anti-mormonism? Anti-big-chinism? Anti-anti-illegal-immigrationism? Nope, my guess is...(discussed in my next blog :-)