Scott: The media bias is starting to get pathetic.
See Maine results so far
Maine
(as of 11:04 pm, ET) Reporting: 40%
Candidate Votes %
John Kerry 3,373
46.4%
Howard Dean 1,882
25.9%
Dennis J Kucinich 978
13.5%
John Edwards 650
8.9%
Wesley K Clark 276
3.8%
Uncommitted 95
1.3%
Al Sharpton 15
0.2%
Other (WI) 0
0.0%
Now I will concede that the combined vote doesn't add up to a good audience for a minor league baseball game but the state has as many people as NH and more than DE and ND. A good fraction of the population is Boston suburban [the sprawl spills past Portland ME]. Kerry still cannot put a majority together yet the media are calling it a blowout. As is he barely beat the combined left vote. I saw state media in the Block that didn't take their marching orders this baldly. Dean's survival is a non-story. Kerry's attrition is trumpted as the biggest thing since Sherman marched through the South. Essentially the media wanted a story that isn't Dean. We can debate how much is partisanship, how much is pack journalism, how much is horse race/expectations reporting and how much is just how much they DON"T like Howard the Duck but the net effect is that they are annointing Kerry. In a state that knows him well from the Boston media he is underperforming his showing in Michigan yesterday. There was zero news to change things. They just know him a little better. Now I am not saying Kerry is evil, the second coming of Satan or anysuch. If you like party line liberal Democrats he's an OK guy. He makes the occassional iconaclastic speech then scurries right back into Kennedy's shadow. I personally dispise the guy [old business from Central America - he was one of the two Sandanista groupies in the Senate] but I kind of doubt one voter in ten thousand gives a damn about who were the twin protectors of the red swine in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80's. He is a Mondale-Dukakis-Kennedy democrat - the old pre-Clinton establishment. He is not a flaming leftie like Wellstone. He was Skull and Bones [a Yale secret society whose other members include the Bushes]. However since he was annointed by the media as the un-Dean the gangup and groupspeak has been pathetic. Come the summer when the details of his voting record and the Big Dig get picked apart the media will be shocked to discover that he is who he is. What a way to pick a candidate.
posted by scott 8:17 PM