Letters to the Editor
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tristero and rollotomasi
First, writing about a Gail Collins oped tristero picks up one of Glenn's themes:
when she started answering questions, she got very Hillary — talking about carbon neutrality and H.M.O. payments and procurement reform, ticking off her five-point plans and three-part explanations. The large crowd, which had been standing in a high school gym for nearly two hours before she arrived, seemed to enjoy it. Her bond with the people isn’t a passionate one, but when it works, it’s a genuine connection that starts with the belief that she will work really, really hard on their behalf.
Apparently, to Collins, the reason Clinton won had very little to do with the fact she's willing to listen to voters. Or that she knows what she's talking about on a myriad of issues, any one of which is far beyond the capability of Collins' pea brain to master. Or that voters actually do care about these issues and care that someone has thought them through and can be articulate and organized in discussing them (flashback: "Is our children learning?" Oh such a charming manly codpiece of a man!). Or that voters weighed what Clinton proposed and concluded they were pretty good ideas, and that she made a better case than her rivals.
It is simply incomprehensible to the punditocracy that people who show up at candidate events are actually interested in policy questions, and hang on the words of even the wonkiest presentation.
rollotomasi:
The best analysis I've seen of how the polls could have been so wrong is Chris Bowers:
http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3156
He, eschewing catastrophe theory, presents all the not media backlash reasons. I still think that there was such a backlash, if only because I've found myself so often angrily defending Clinton from what i see as unfair treatment. She's my third to last choice, but that doesn't mean that the media should be systematically whacking her (and ignoring Edwards).