digital emunction

…is the gorgeous phrase cooked up by John Dickerson in his story today at Slate for the Palin vice-presidential pick. It’s a good article, and in it Dickerson neatly captures what seems to be the quick-setting conventional wisdom about Palin, at least among non-hardcore Republicans:

Each new fact we learn about Sarah Palin—her reversal on the bridge to nowhere, her disagreements with McCain on issues from windfall profits to global warming, emerging facts about troopergate—contribute to the feeling that this whole Palin thing is being made up as we go along. It may be fun to read about, and it sure is fun to cover, but it also supports the judgment of the Palin pick that I first heard from a Republican veteran shortly after the announcement: “Reckless.”

…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Democratic nomination was going to end. And sure enough, the whimpering has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s article in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cornerstone of the new conventional wisdom about the race. [Read more]

I’ve been reading a lot of political coverage this primary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that reading I’ve developed a number of pet peeves about political reporting. Many of these, I realize, are common and long-standing complaints: from the echo-chamber aspect of it all to the too-predictable cycle that carries “news” from a campaign conference call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to articles in the newspapers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major complaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the campaigns and the news media appear to share an assumption that seems to me mostly unwarranted. [Read more]

Today at Slate, Alex Halperin wonders why a Kenyan exit poll sponsored by the International Republican Institute hasn’t been released to the public:

The International Republican Institute, a democracy-fostering nonprofit funded by the U.S. government—and despite the name, officially nonpartisan*—commissioned an Election Day exit poll but has declined to release the results. Two people familiar with the results told me that they showed [Raila] Odinga with a substantial lead over President Kibaki—one reported eight points, the other nine points.

Why would the IRI withhold a poll that showed Odinga in the lead? I’d guess that it has something to do with Odinga’s political past: he trained as an engineer in East Germany and named his first child Fidel Castro, and his father was an open proponent of a socialist political program. From what I’ve heard from people in the country, Odinga’s (past/present/potential) socialist tendencies have been a quiet but recurring theme in pro-Kibaki political arguments. The answer to Halperin’s question might therefore be depressingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

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*Note: It may be true, as Halperin argues, that the IRI “missed an opportunity to advance its mission of promoting democracy and fair elections,” but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, a person familiar with the organization’s activities in Haiti a decade ago might be excused for doubting the sincerity of that mission in the first place. Saying that the International Republican Institute is “officially nonpartisan” is a little like saying that Iran is “officially democratic”: it’s true but pointless.

I’ve got an article on Dante’s Paradiso (and why it’s so unloved) up at Slate this week. Check it out!