I do not think that word means what the WaPo thinks it does

Romney won the Maine caucuses and the CPAC straw poll, and the Washington Post tells us:

Coupled with his victory in Saturday’s straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, the Maine win gives the GOP front-runner and former Massachusetts governor a substantial [sic] boost heading into a 17-day period in which there will be no contests.

Wow.  His margin in Maine was 194 votes; at the CPAC 238; if that scores a substantial boost, there’s been some really serious grade inflation down your newsrooms.

Author: Michael O'Hare

Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training. He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs. At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.

4 thoughts on “I do not think that word means what the WaPo thinks it does”

  1. The (conspiratorial, quite possibly overhyped) buzz is that he may not even have won the Maine caucuses - that dedicated followers of Ron Paul may have outhustled casual voters for Romney to win a majority of the delegates on offer.
    And, of course, he got fewer votes in Maine than he did four years ago against stronger opposition, in a year that according to obvious indicators (who the incumbent party was, how satisfied people were) was likely less favorable to the Republicans.

  2. I heard that too. Story I read was that Romney’s camp got them to declare the winner of the Maine caucus before votes Paul was likely to get were counted. Also read that Romney packed the CPAC poll using a tactic that Paul has used in the past (everybody does it, they say) - buying tickets for busloads of supporters. The story claims that the Republican establishment is rigging their own primary process to get the nominee that they want. Some folks just can’t seem to help themselves.

  3. This brilliant Frank Rich paragraph digs deep into the Romney hype that apparently continues unabated:

    Much of the Romney inflation, naturally, has to do with his good fortune in having such a splintered and screwy scrum of opponents. Often we’re told that he “looks like a president” (that would be a pre-Obama president). We also hear constantly about his message discipline, his organization, and his money—attributes that matter more to political consultants and the pundits who pal around with them than to an angry electorate trying to dig out of a recession. To the political class, Romney is the most electable candidate because his mealy-mouthed blandness is what will lure that much-apotheosized yet indistinct band of moderates and independents to his side. But as Michael Kinsley long ago joked that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, so Mitt Romney is a political hack’s idea of an electable conservative president.

    Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?
    http://nymag.com/print/?/news/frank-rich/mitt-romney-2012-2/

  4. Corporate media pundits reflect their bosses’ desires. The bosses want Romney, so the default is to say Romney has momentum at every win, and then when he loses a race, to say well, he’ll come back. South Carolina was only important if Romney won. It was not important the moment he was losing.

    Did anyone see C-Span last week where Robert George at the NY Post actually admitted in a panel with Robert Kuttner that he would rather not get fired by attacking Fox Network programming, since Fox also owns the NY Post. It was said in that sort “joking” way where the person really isn’t joking. These people know precisely where to stand for their bosses, as middle managers do in most corporations.

    The sooner people begin to analyze corporate media as a group of corporations, meaning their social liberalism and economic conservatism reflects the executives’ views, the sooner they will see through the lie of the “liberal” media slogan.

Comments are closed.