posted November 08, 2012 11:45 AM            

John Ziegler Conservative filmmaker/commentator

Posted: 11/06/2012 11:13 pm

There is no doubt that going into the final days of this presidential election there was a greater disparity in the perceptions of what the outcome would be among the media elites of each political side than any other time in the era of modern technology. Liberals were completely convinced that President Obama would be reelected, while conservatives tended to not just believe Mitt Romney would beat him, but that he would do so in a landslide.

So why did the conservative media get it so wrong? Because I am a conservative who was confident that Obama would win a tight race, I think that I may be in unique position to explain why this happened.

First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.

As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.

While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).

But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.

This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).

What they didn't seem to understand is that an incredibly small percentage of the electorate was dealing with the same data points about Obama as they were. The vast majority of voters, especially those who make up "undecideds," make their candidate selections based on a frighteningly small amount of "information" (which is why, as silly as it was, Obama was politically smart to jump on the "Big Bird" issue).

Not realizing this reality further perverts what is already the modern bubble in which commentators tend to live due to this era of extreme media fragmentation. Because we all gravitate to the information we want to believe is true, this creates a set of circumstances in which the truth gets easily lost.

For instance, at the well respected conservative website Hot Air, well over 90% of their respondents to a poll the day before the election believed that Romney would win, most by a large margin. It is not a coincidence that the site provided information and commentary which almost universally both backed up and facilitated that belief.

Related to this is also the commercial aspect of the modern news media. There is absolutely no doubt that partisan outlets (which now describes about 100% of the media) do far better with their audiences when they tell them what they want to hear. I personally got an enormous amount of irrational grief (and actually lost twitter followers!) because I dared to write about how I thought Obama would win, even though my predictions were actually more optimistic than what the left was tending to portend. The fact that I was correct will mean absolutely nothing to my detractors because credibility no longer has any currency in this celebrity driven culture.

This last point is why Dick Morris can add to his extraordinary record of being catastrophically wrong about just about every major prediction he makes without fear (as long as Fox News renews his contract) of being held accountable. Conservatives are not going to be angry at conservative commentators for telling them what they wanted to hear. They will now simply blame the mainstream media, fraud, and the "low info" voters instead. The conservative outlets themselves will now be all too happy to still have Obama around as a cash cow for the next four years.

I will say that I was shocked that the usually credible Michael Barone also fell into this trap of predicting a Romney landslide based on instinct rather than actual data, but the fact that it can even happen to him proves just how strong all of the forces at work here really are.

I was not influenced by these factors not because I am particularly smart, but rather mostly because I don't trust people. I only trust actions based on self interest. I was perfectly willing to buy the notion that the polls were, to a small but significant degree, biased in favor of Obama, but there were far more reliable factors which told me this was not really the case.

It was clear to me that beating Obama would require a performance equivalent to a major "upset" in sports. In almost all cases when such an event happens there is at least one moment when something dramatic occurs to change the balance of the contest. The first debate was not that moment. All that did was get Romney into the game. He still needed to land his knockout punch and, despite being given the Benghazi story as weapon with which to deliver it, he was either unwilling or unable to do so.

When the Romney campaign decided at the last moment to make a significant play in Pennsylvania (the graveyard of modern Republican presidential candidates) it was a dead give away about what was really happening. Interestingly, those who interpreted that action through their hearts and their wallets saw it as a sign of strength and a coming Romney landslide. Those of us who only seek the truth saw it for what it really was: an act of desperation caused by the belated realization they couldn't win Ohio because they were too weak in their response to Obama's attacks on the auto issue there.

One of the many reasons that the conservative movement is in such deep trouble is that those who were wrong here will suffer no consequences and those who knew the truth will receive no benefit.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ziegler/romney-loss-conservative-media_b_2084911.html

posted November 08, 2012 11:49 AM            

12:35 pm November 7, 2012, by Jay

There’s truth being told in conservative circles today, for those who are willing to hear it.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, for example, appears to be throwing his support behind the so-called DREAM Act, which would allow young immigrants brought here illegally as children to attend college and earn citizenship:

“In the next Congress, I am committed to working on upward mobility policies that will ensure people who work hard and play by the rules can rise above the circumstances of their birth and leave their children better off. The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them.”

And Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, asks why so many of his conservative colleagues were shocked and surprised last night, given that the outcome had been predicted for weeks by polls and expert analysis.

His conclusion: Because under the business model employed by the right-wing media at Fox News and elsewhere, it is more profitable to tell conservatives what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.

“But guess what?” he asks his fellow conservatives.

You haven’t just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven’t tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they’ve done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

Why do you keep putting up with it?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a “Grand Jihad” against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who’d lose worse than George McGovern.

How many months were wasted on them?

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don’t Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn’t grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man’s record nor repudiate it.

The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.”

The piece gets stronger from there, including language I’m not allowed to publish on this blog. If you’re a conservative seriously concerned about your movement’s future, I highly recommend it. Because if you don’t get this part right, you cannot get the rest of it right.

posted November 08, 2012 11:58 AM            

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ann-coulter/2012/11/08/coulter-column-dont-blame-romney-blame-purist-conservatives#ixzz2BeQWjmgn

Ann Coulter says what?! This is too much coming from someone like her. A rare moment of faithfulness to her Sun sign.

posted November 08, 2012 01:57 PM            

Looks like there will not be any introspection in the GOP. Its Democrats for the rest of the 21st century, unless more young Ron Paul types spring up and kick the Neocon fossils from the GOP and occupy a right of center space which will focus mainly on economic improvement. Race and Religion need never be an election issue in a 21st Century Democracy.

posted November 08, 2012 02:28 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by iQ:
Conservative Media just abdicated their responsibility, and chose to spread disinformation. Look at Rush Limbaugh, still as arrogant, self-righteous and tasteless as ever. Obama wins 332 to 206 and he says the country is lost.

Looks like there will not be any introspection in the GOP. Its Democrats for the rest of the 21st century, unless more young Ron Paul types spring up and kick the Neocon fossils from the GOP and occupy a right of center space which will focus mainly on economic improvement. Race and Religion need never be an election issue in a 21st Century Democracy.

---

U may be right regarding the GOP's introspection or lack of, but don't go to fast regarding democrats for the 21st century, cause too many things can come and upsrt what would seem, today, the ideal direction.

posted November 08, 2012 03:31 PM            

But I think this type of blindness to reason is also very telling of a leaning toward buying into very fundamentalist ideas, showing a stronghold of fundamentalist evangelical Christians in the country.

The loss of Wisconsin (Paul Ryan's home state) and the election of the first openly gay woman to the senate (Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin) was the first indication (as the results poured in that night) of the total misinterpretation of reality by the conservatives.

In retrospect, I think Romney's switch from the extreme right of his base to presenting himself as a more moderate right during the first debate, was perhaps indicative of him beginning to sense his party's failed approach. But I don't think there was much he could do to change the situation.

In contrast, Obama's strategy turned out to be brilliant--very targeted and focused on the groups they needed to whet. Nancy Pelosi said on the Charlie Rose show that the dems were not listening to the daily fluctuating polls and were approaching the election with only one assumption--that the race was neck to neck.

Seems like this realistic approach worked and helped the dems to really focus on their target groups by using a formidable "ground force", to the exclusion of all else. This is why the Prez was so grateful to his campaign staff. He knew that voter turn out was going to be critical. So one of the last things he said on camera on the eve of the election, was a reminder to the voters to bring their id's. For a Prez to pay attention to such a "housekeeping" detail is unusual, and underscores his focus on only that which was important (kudos to his Virgo Mars).

In the end I'm not sure I understand why the republican party is clinging to out dated ways of thinking when it's not getting them anywhere. Surely the fact that they haven't won the popular vote in an election for almost 30 yrs. would be a clue.

If they continue to get their information from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who's probably THE most bigoted bigot that's out there, then they're going to continue to fail in achieving their goals.

The dems, on the other hand, need to realize that they've got to continue to be vigilant in the march forward. The Prez. already said in his victory speech that he needs people from the outside to "push" him so that he can deliver the goods.

Hopefully there will be no complacency, which is the bane of human progress.

As for the Prez ... Barack on Mr. Obama!!!

posted November 09, 2012 05:58 PM            

Just wanted you to see it. All in good fun, K?