Conservative Blogger: Sinking Like a Stone?...

The mid-term elections are less than thirty days away.

As a result, I am not shocked to see stories like this in the Media Spin Machine:

President George W. Bush and Republicans are sinking under the weight of the Iraq war and the Capitol Hill sex scandal, according to a flurry of polls, endangering their control of Congress in the November 7 elections.

Democrats hold a growing advantage heading into the final four weeks of the campaign, with analysts moving more Republican-held seats into the high-risk category and improving the odds of Democrats seizing control of at least the House of Representatives.

The polls, all taken after the sex scandal surfaced, show Democratic candidates with huge leads over Republicans amid broad public unhappiness about the Iraq war, Bush's leadership and the Republican-led Congress.

I hate polls. Really. I hate them. I think they're worthless and that they usually exist for no other reason than to create news. Pollsters can get whatever answer they want in response to a poll and then manipulate the numbers in their favor.

Conversely, the MSM loves polls. We see new polling data practically every day of the week, and then those same polls are broken down to practically each decimal point on cable. Then, they take said polling data and write stories like these.

The first three paragraphs of that story from Reuters sound like they're from a big-budget movie trailer:

"...sinking under the weight..."
"...endangering their control of Congress..."
"...Democrats hold a growing advantage..."
"...Democrats seizing control..."
"...broad public unhappiness..."

From this story you would think that the villagers are at the gates with torches and pitchforks. If all of that is true--and the MSM truly thinks it is--we ought to be near anarchy in the United States. People must be planning a coup, right?

If that were the case, why would Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum be within five points of his challenger, Bobby Casey? If Republicans are "sinking under the weight," shouldn't he be getting crushed? The five points that Santorum is down is the margin of error. That means that race is far from over.

There are also two key House races in Colorado--a state that isn't exactly "red"--where the GOP is ten points ahead in one race, and only six points behind in the other.

If the GOP is doing so poorly, why are we still in these highly contested races? Look at everything that's been going on with the GOP: the Foley sex scandal, the Iraq war, lack of leadership in the GOP-controlled Congress. Each of these things should be killing us.

Thanks to the Democrats, they're not.

The only saving grace in any of this mid-term election analysis is that the Democrats have a worse strategy than the Republicans do. People complain all the time that American politics has become voting for "the lesser of two evils." Well, now it's "voting for the idea that sucks the least."

This is the home-stretch of the campaign. Four weeks is a lot of time in a campaign and, while I think the GOP will probably lose some seats in both houses of Congress, I don't think it's going to be the bloodletting that the MSM is trying to spin.

Four weeks, folks. This thing is far from over.

William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com

Posted by WilliamSmith on October 11, 2006 09:34 AM to Conservative Blogger