The profound historical ignorance of our punditry

[dsc]

Listening to our punditry one would think that never in the history of a country has a candidate for President waited to accept the nomination. The truth is actually the opposite. It used to be the norm to wait to accept the nomination and to do so from one's hometown. The first nominee to break that tradition was FDR in 1932. As late as 1944, the Republican nominee gave a very short, non commital response and elaborated further from his home state of Indiana. Full disclosure, I was ignorant of this fact too before I listened to this:

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2&prgDate=26-May-2004
(go to history of delaying the acceptence of the nomination)

on Wednesday's All Things Considered. But I don't discuss politics for a living, nor do I have a research staff to help me. Yet again, the profound laziness and ignorance of our pundit class is on display.

[Alerter_]

1. "pundits" are entertainers, why do we take them seriously?

When I think of "pundit" I think of George Will, a nerdy half-wit who writes "about" the news and gets it wrong most of the time. Why should we care? I heard about him, read some of his articles, and got bored quickly.

[dsc]

2. because, in this case, the punditry

made Kerry give up his idea of delaying acceptance of the nomination. Thus Bush will have more money than Kerry in the months of July through Novemember, just when the race is closing.

[SmokingJacket]

3. It's not so much that they're ignorant

which they may well be, but that they exploit *our* ignorance. Why spend time researching facts when they just impede your dumb rant? Pundits can rest assured no one's going to call them on it.

[jpgray]

4. I was going to say this in your Dean thread, but may as well put it here

The awesome power of our punditry cannot be questioned either. They ragged on Gore nonstop for about two years, and they carefully constructed a system of scripts regarding Dean that they could close on him after the Iowa speech 'validated' them. Kerry has already been somewhat snared with two, the 'fip-flop' and the 'his Iraq plan is the same as Bush's!'--both are carefully designed to collapse on him if he makes too significant a misstep.

[H2O Man]

5. Interesting....

I only heard this one time when it was an issue. It seems like an ideal opportunity to nail the republicans on their ignorance/misrepresenting the truth was lost .... Kerry could have issued a short statement, saying the republicans don't know their history, etc.

It seems to bring up a more significant point: why doesn't the Kerry campaign have a response to the republican "flip-flop" crap? Even using Reagan's "there you go again!" ..... something to say over and over in the campaign, until the "flip-flop" statement is considered the set-up to the punch line.