Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Dewey Defeats Truman

In an effort to avoid some of the intrusive graphics and over-the-top commentary of the cable news channels, I tried watching campaign coverage on PBS tonight. Two things happened:

(1) PBS, apparently relying on the AP, called Missouri for Hillary Clinton pretty early in the night. When it did so, most of the precincts had reported and Hillary had a three-point lead. But St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and Columbia (home of the University of Missouri) still had nearly all their precincts outstanding! Unsurprisingly, the call ended up being wrong. It's not good when a news outlet makes a prediction that anyone with access to the county-by-county vote totals on cnn.com could tell was wrong.

(2) PBS cut away from Obama in the middle of his speech to show us a bunch of random pundits blathering on about the same things they'd been talking about all night.

PBS is now dead to me, campaign coverage-wise.

Also, MSNBC is now noting that a Missouri statute provides for a recount in elections as close as this one, but wouldn't that be incredibly silly in a state with proportional delegate representation?

2 comments:

Ann said...

There was an interesting comment (I don't remember if it was on MSNBC or PBS, since I too was watching both) about how the Ted Kennedy endorsement of Obama will probably help more next week in MD/DC/VA than it did this week in MA. But the Kennedy endorsement that I really think is going to help Obama (And this is just my opinion, not something off of tv) is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's endorsement of Hillary. Because people here hate Kathleen (she did successfully lose the governor's mansion to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years, ie since Spiro Agnew last won the governorship), and so if they were still on the fence they would be persuaded to go over to Obama just to spite her.

And the Washington Post isn't saying anything about a MO recount - not that that means it isn't happening.

Anonymous said...

No recount would move the number of delegates by more than one either way, but one delegate could be significant before this is over. Nonetheless, I have heard no talk of recounts here.

I don't know if you've found something similar, but the best site (by far) I have found for tracking the delegate situation is:

demconwatch.blogspot.com

In addition to very authoritative numbers on pledged delegates, it has the only comprehensive list of superdelegates and their endorsements that I have seen.