Colin McEnroe in his blog yesterday made a salient point about the disconnect between what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington DC and the on the ground reality of local elections, often pushing their own narratives at the public's expense.
Yesterday, Mr. Dankosky, speaking on [NPR's] "Talk of the Nation," put into words something I too have been thinking (but less coherently). There's a disconnect, he said, between how the Beltway sees this story and how people see it in Connecticut. In Washington, Blumenthal is all but finished. Andrea Mitchell went as far as to say he will be forced out of the race. "You heard it here first," she said. That's for sure. But she's not the only one. The national press has been shopping, since last Tuesday, the idea that Blumenthal is hopelessly damaged goods and cannot possibly be elected.
Today, we got a sense of how completely barren this line of reasoning is. The Q Poll is out. Blumenthal leads McMahon by 25 points. His approvals and favorables are high. Hers aren't. The inevitable barrage of commercials may change things but, just now, the Vietnam story doesn't seem to matter much.
McEnroe gives one reason why this happens, with a colorful metaphor, but entire books could be written on how ill-served the American public is by their lame stream media.
The other part of this is that the national and Washington press can't really cover a political story that isn't big and cataclysmic. For the Blumenthal story to feed their shrieking furnace, they need to make it huge, even if that means ignoring the reporters standing on the ground. You can hear Mr. Dankosky gently, politely trying to educate the Talk of the Nation guys about how this looks where he's standing, in Connecticut, you know, where the people actually vote in the Senate election. And they're just not buying it.
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