Black Box Report

Ever since a flubbed question on immigration a few weeks ago in Philadelphia, pundits everywhere have spent their time talking about Hillary's bad stretch of road. Had she damaged her campaign? Could she comeback?

"Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years"

It seems like the fake narrative coming out of yesterday's debate is that Hillary Clinton is now "coming back" after her fake "stumbling" in the previous debate. As best I can tell, she didn't actually stumble then and she's not actually coming back now and nothing has actually changed.

No, nothing HAS changed. Clinton is still averaging 20+ points over her competition, and despite the current climate of obsession with driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, it's really not an issue for any presidential candidate to get worked up about. But no sooner is one media-forced narrative foisted upon us, than the next one begins to take shape:

If the last debate was the moment where Democrats realized that the Clinton coronation was, at least, postponed…This debate was about Clinton effectively fighting back, Obama sticking to his guns and separation between those two and everyone else.

See there? Big cable network blog declares it's now officially a two-person race. Nevermind the merits of the debate performances themselves, or any analysis of the candidates' positions that might allow the public to decide who is "in" or "out" of the race. It's a horse race. And we should all be thankful we have our intellectual betters in the national media to tell us what's what. Suggesting that someone other than Clinton or Obama did well displays a lack of respect for the official post-debate narrative:

If most of the attacks were geared towards Clinton in Philly, most of the attacks were geared towards Edwards last night. He can reasonably make the case that this was a positive development - he's important enough to go after.

And if a non-narrative-approved candidate provides important onsight on an issue that could - and should - shape the debate, well, there's just not enough time to talk about that. It's much easier to talk about the horse race between the "big two" than to inform the public:

The gap for the "big two" is nothing new, of course, and it has little to do with debate performances. It's based on celebrity, fundraising and media attention, which reinforce each other in an autocatalytic political process that has left serious and more seasoned candidates in the dust. The media may be so beholden to this story about "the big two" -- remember when it was three? -- that what candidates actually do at debates will not be allowed to get in the way. But for voters who actually listened on Thursday, Joe Biden offered a bold and specific alternative foreign policy for the United States.

Candidates providing specifics on how to deal with, say, Pakistan just doesn't sell papers/get viewers/generate traffic. Especially when you've got fluff like this to feed them:

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Hmmmm..."diamonds or pearls?" It's not "boxers or briefs," but...this is CNN not MTV.

I don't mean to single out CNN for being intentionally obtuse and shallow. Our cream of the punditry crop have decided they don't give a damn about informing the public when it interferes with their horse race narrative:

Russert flashed the following quote from Rudy on the screen justifying his relationship with Kerik:

"There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what's the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result ... was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, [and] a 60 percent reduction in crime..

"Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape."

Neither Russert nor his guests spent a second asking whether Rudy's claims were true. Russert selected this quote beforehand, so he had plenty of time to entertain this question. But he didn't -- and neither did his guests. Instead, they only discussed whether it will work politically.

And yet, as has already been thoroughly documented, Rudy's claims amount to dissembling of the wildest sort...
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The point is, no matter how you interpret it, Rudy's push-back demands aggressive factual scrutiny. Yet here you have a group at the top of the punditry game -- Russert, Chuck Todd, Ronald Brownstein, Gwenn Ifil, etc. -- and none of them even took a tentative step down that path. These folks are so preoccupied with whether Rudy's pushback will work that there's no mental space left to question whether it's true. The irony, of course, is that this wrongheaded focus makes it more likely that Rudy's pushback will work.

This point was driven home when, in the final downer, one of the assembled pundits says: "If he is the nominee, time will begin again, the morning after. We will begin to explore the New York record, and debate it and discuss it in a way that we haven't so far."

A roomful of chimps with videocameras and laptops could hardly do better.