Polls, Polls, and glitter and glamour

Senator Hillary Clinton's striking comeback in the New Hampshire primary has proven the pollsters wrong. Senator Barak Obama did not trounce her by a double digit per centage; she beat him by 3 per cent. Obama has the gift of gab, and he has enthused America's young who hardly vote. He won the Iowa causus on the merits of his own talents and the eagerness of his youthful supporters. And his win in Iowa, the pollsters hailed as the coming of the new Jerusalem in American politics. Maybe? But pollsters, newscasters, and talking heads work for big outfits who hop from one event to another to sell newspapers or boost or maintain ratings or are every ready to drop pearls of banality for a fee at a drop of the hat. So they found fool's gold in the Iowa primary, and projected their fancy into another win for Mr. Obama, which proved wrong. As those who still read Freund, projection is a sign of flummery, and this in New Hampshire turned out to be the case. Only one poll, a small university poll, had days before the money on Mrs. Clinton, and they predicted that she would nose out Mr. Obama by 3 per centage points. Which she indeed did! They overlooked the Clinton campaigns strengths, and yes experience and hard work in the political arena, and swallowed the false bait of youth and change. Afterwards they sat before tthe cameras and talked up a storm of what went wrong, and the newspapers flowed purple in stilted prose as to how and why Mrs Clinton pulled the rabbit out of the hat in New Hampshire. The press doesn't like Mrs. Clinton, nor do the talking heads on the whole. Like the Roosevelts and the Kennedys before them, they represent a challenge to the old boys and girls circles of privilege and money and the status quo. These fatuous fools have shown themselves incompetent, and the voters in New Hampshire who see the standing of living of theirs sinking and the country they thought they knew, sold to the highest bidder and awash in corruption and incompetence, know who is on their side. And that's partly why Mrs. Clinton rose victorious like a roc out the ashes of Iowa, and triumphed in New Hampshire. Will pollsters and punsters and pundits and journalists learn the right lesson? Maybe yes? Maybe no? Let 18Brumaire quote the great Roman orator Cicero: 'Not to know what has been transaction in former times is to be always as a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge'. And so it has in the pre New Hampshire primary pollsters' projections!