We rethink the week with Rick Newman, lobbyist and former NH state representative; and Dean Spiliotis, Civic Scholar and Presidential Scholar at Southern New Hampshire University. We discuss last week’s Iowa caucuses – with their chaos, incompetence and possibly unreliable results – as well as the Democratic debate on Friday and NH Dems’ “100 Club” dinner. We agree that Joe Biden’s campaign appears to be in its final days. We wonder who will replace him as a refuge for the centrist Democratic voters.
We discuss whether the media are once again skewing their reporting about the presidential campaign. For 4 years now, and until about a month ago, Bernie Sanders supporters complained that the media essentially erased Bernie from their reporting. Although he was drawing huge crowds and enjoying high poll numbers, Bernie was invisible in most media. Recently, the media have noticed Bernie – they report about him endlessly (both good and bad).
But now it’s Elizabeth Warren who is invisible. We see a disproportionate amount of coverage of the irrelevant seesaw bouncing back-and-forth between Sanders & Buttigieg, which one is ahead by a few votes, as the precinct results trickled in all week. We also saw a lot of coverage of Joe Biden’s slide from front-runner to also-ran. That was appropriate in light of the political significance.
But Warren’s strong third-place finish in Iowa — with large numbers of votes and a significant share of Iowa delegates — is barely mentioned in the media. Even more troubling is the media’s extrapolation, from its distorted Iowa focus, into an apparent decision to ignore Warren’s support in New Hampshire. Instead, the media are crowing about Amy Klobuchar’s supposed rise to “top-tier” status, even though in Iowa she was barely able to qualify for one single delegate.
We note the repeated conversations about the role of billionaires in the Democratic presidential race. Is Pete Buttigieg a “bought” candidate because there are so many billionaires who’ve donated a lot of money to him, and who probably expect to receive something in return for their donations? Is Bloomberg’s donation of billions of dollars of his own money in the same category, to be a negative factor in voters’ eyes when they make their election decisions? Should the conversation instead be about whether Bernie or Warren better represent the voters who believe our political system (and our economic world) should be more focused on the 99% of regular working Americans and less dominated by the billionaires?
Tonight, on election eve, Pres. Trump will hold a rally in the heart of Manchester. The police are closing down the area surrounding Trump’s venue, which happens to include virtually the entire downtown area. What does this mean for other candidates (specifically Democrats) who want to campaign in the center of NH’s largest city? And what about all the national (and international) media who are all plugged into NH’s regular reporting hub: which is a building literally catty-corner from Trump’s speech? Will the press be unable to report on developments in the NH primary, unless they remain locked in their rooms and don’t leave for 12 hours?
Finally, we wondered why the Democratic candidates are allowing Trump to goad them into wasting their scarce communication time by responding to all the distractions and side-issues that Trump keeps tweeting about? As James Carville noted yesterday, the candidates should be emphasizing the issues that really matter to voters: the economy, health care, the desperate financial situations of ordinary working people, and the yawning disparities between the very wealthy 1% and the rest of us.
