Primary Doom

A major trope in the 50 days (2/14-5/6) of WaPo presidential race editorial tracking was the “suicidal Dems” theme. I often found myself snickering at this repetitive, hyperbolic, primary handwringing. Of the 139 total Op-Ed pieces (28 in February, 47 in March, 52 in April, and 12 in May), 11 had the specific message of, “The Democrats are hurting themselves with this protracted primary battle.”  This very narrow topic comprised a whopping 8 percent of all tracked articles.

Now, intuitively, this thinking made sense. The fight between Clinton and Obama often seemed ugly and counter productive.  But these pundits did not make a compelling case for the damaging impact of an extended primary fight. More importantly, aren’t there other pertinent issues to harp on?

Some horserace pundits had serious addictions to this chicken little special. Most amusingly, David Broder (who led all pundits with 3 primary concern pieces) wrote about this topic on 4/20, and then wrote about the exact same thing on 4/24. Sigh, here are the listed doomsayers.

February

2/25 Bob Novak

March

3/6 Harold Meyerson

3/6 David Broder

3/6 Bob Novak

3/11 Richard Cohen

3/17 Bob Novak

April

4/15 E.J. Dionne Jr.

4/20 David Broder

4/24 David Broder

4/25 Eugene Robinson

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.