I copped a lot of flak over the course of the US Elections for running a contrarian narrative regarding the race…bottom line though is I was looking at facts and figures dispassionately and not through a lens coloured by partisanship.
Sure it is easier to do when it is another country, so some clarity can cut through the crap. I have learned a valuable lesson that I will now try to implement when looking at New Zealand politics.
Cut through the crap and inform readers of facts not spin.
Forget a nickel; I’d a sixpence for every piece of conservative crapola spin I heard in the last two months. In retrospect, it’s very revealing about they try to game the system to get places like Politico and other mainstream outfits to assume they’re correct and accept their assumptions.
There was no way on Earth, for example, that young people were going to turn out this time. They were a higher percentage this time than last. Higher! Gallup, for one, bought into this in a huge way.
There was also no way Obama voters were as enthusiastic as Romney voters. Just no way. The enthusiasm gap. Everyone bought it. Again, the opposite was true.
Americans were going to be outraged by Benghazi. Chicago made up jobs numbers. Florida was a done deal. Romney had momentum until Sandy. And on and on.
Conservatives say these things with such conviction. I think they believe them to be true. And there’s a reason for that. Not so long ago, when conservatives said these things en bloc, they would come true. They’d happen. Back in Clinton’s day, say. Or Bush’s, before the debacles really hit home.
But then at some point, the majority of Americans stopped buying conservative bullshit. It must have been after Iraq. And Katrina. But now, conservatives can’t make surrealities come true just by saying so.
