Maybe we should just cancel the primaries, the conventions, and the general election. It’s Hillary, and she’s inevitable. After all, the mainstream media say so. She’s ahead of Obama in national polls! – which, as Richelieu noted yesterday, have not been an infallible guide in the Democratic party to the subsequent nominations of Ed Muskie, John Glenn, and Howard Dean. Well, the media say, her lead has increased in September! – which, as Jay Cost points out today, says very little about what happens when the real campaign begins. That real campaign will begin in Iowa – where Clinton has no lead over either Obama or Edwards. It will feature real paid advertising, of which Obama will be able to afford as much as Clinton, and where Edwards will have some ability to compete. And it will feature real daily attacks and responses, an area where none of the leading candidates has been seriously tested. The media are also excited that Clinton is 8 points ahead of Giuliani in a general election match up. But the outcome of half of recent general elections have reversed the October poll match-ups of the year before. So, as an analytic matter, claims of inevitability are wrong. Luckily, readers of the mainstream media increasingly understand how herd-like that particular collection of independent minds is. And, as a matter of civic health, such claims of inevitability should be resisted, as campaigns that resort to them (Bush 2000) are really trying to short-circuit the electoral process, and treat citizens as sheep. Luckily, voters tend to react against these claims – witness the McCain surge in New Hampshire in 2000, and the Gore surge in the last week of the general election the same year. You could say that McCain and Gore fell short. I’d say, not by much. It’s appropriate that the Bushes and the Clintons, and their retainers, particularly like the inevitability argument. It goes with the territory of a dynasty. Divinely ordained kings liked arguments about inevitability. I suspect most Americans, free in spirit and democratic in attitude, do not.
