A Theory About Conservative Crapola

Forget a nickel; I'd a sixpence for every piece of conservative crapola spin I heard in the last two months. In retrospect, it's very revealing about they try to game the system to get places like Politico and other mainstream outfits to assume they're correct and accept their assumptions.

There was no way on Earth, for example, that young people were going to turn out this time. They were a higher percentage this time than last. Higher! Gallup, for one, bought into this in a huge way.

There was also no way Obama voters were as enthusiastic as Romney voters. Just no way. The enthusiasm gap. Everyone bought it. Again, the opposite was true.

Americans were going to be outraged by Benghazi. Chicago made up jobs numbers. Florida was a done deal. Romney had momentum until Sandy. And on and on.

Conservatives say these things with such conviction. I think they believe them to be true. And there's a reason for that. Not so long ago, when conservatives said these things en bloc, they would come true. They'd happen. Back in Clinton's day, say. Or Bush's, before the debacles really hit home.

But then at some point, the majority of Americans stopped buying conservative bullshit. It must have been after Iraq. And Katrina. But now, conservatives can't make surrealities come true just by saying so.

The catch is that big chunks of the media haven't caught up with the public. So, even though conservatives complain that reporters are liberal, and even though many may in fact be, most reporters also just kind of assume that conservatives, who come from the heartland and the South and speaking in American accents and tend to have gone to more proletarian kinds of universities, must surely have a firmer grasp of the American pulse.

They most certainly do not. But reporters assume they do, and they buy conservatives' spin. And so up to Election Day, many mainstream reporters bought the idea that the race was tight as a tick. But it never was. Never. It was pretty close for about 12 days, from Oct. 3 to Oct. 15 or so. Then it wasn't again.

Reporters will never stop self-correcting (self-erroring?) in this fashion, because they'll always be secretly intimidated by conservatives in a way they aren't by liberals. Fortunately, the American people now know better.