The Reality-Based Community

Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post needs to read Kevin Drum more often. Kevin is right: aside from the big shift toward the Democrats among Latinos (for which I extend my hearty thanks to Tom Tancredo and Mickey Kaus), this year's Democratic wave was pretty consistent across demographic groups, with the gain among white Evangelicals actually somewhat smaller than average.

Cooperman's story makes the obvious logical mistake of assuming that if Evengelicals switched their votes, they must have done so on Evangelical grounds, rather than hating the war like everyone else. (It would be nice to think that, thinking back on Calvary, people who identify as Gospel Christians were also turned off by torture, but there's no evidence of that; other than poor Ted Haggard and Rick Warren, none of the TV preacher/megachurch operator types seemed to have any problem with waterboarding.)

Cooper, definitely having a bad day, also came up with this howler:

In the states where Democrats fielded candidates who were able to speak credibly about their faith, they made larger gains, according to Vanderslice, who served as a consultant to half a dozen Democratic candidates. Among her clients was Ted Strickland, a minister who won 58 percent of the Catholic vote and 51 percent of the white evangelical vote in the Ohio governor's race against Ken Blackwell, a Republican who has championed conservative Christian causes.

Of course, Ken Blackwell's race couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it, could it now?

The notion that blogging is going to replace reporting is just plain silly. But it's far from obvious to me what newspaper reporters have to add when it comes to analysis, as opposed to fact-gathering. Cooperman's piece notably subtracts from the sum of human knowledge.

Posted at 08:29 PM | TrackBack (1) | |
Thread: Election 2006 , Thread: The wayward press