http://www.nypress.com/17/40/news&columns/feature.cfm Karen Tumulty is Lendl in his prime. Mortals don't stand a chance against her. She is the standard-bearer for a new breed of campaign journalist: the reporter who is incapable of comprehending the election as anything other than a horse race. She appears quite honestly not to understand that it might have some other significance. In the old days, reporters used to lapse into poll-watching and political sportswriting on the campaign trail when they got tired or lazy. Thanks to shameless hacks like Tumulty, the sportswriting has actually replaced issue politics as the only meaningful story of the race.
Tumulty's articles are all the same; they are all about momentum, who has it and why. Every piece is essentially a reaction dealt in response to some new poll, often commissioned by Time and limited to a few dozen mysterious respondents (a recent widely cited Time poll showing Bush ahead had just 857 respondents). The deck to a typical Tumulty piece reads something like this: "A new poll shows Kerry trailing Bush by nine points in four key battleground states. TIME looks at why the Kerry campaign was fucked from the start—and what it must do now to convince us it takes our poll numbers seriously."
Tumulty's most delicious moments of happiness come when she can report on those panicked reactions by the candidates—as she did here on a recent panel appearance on CNN:
What we're seeing is a lot more aggressiveness out of the Kerry campaign and they're continuing to drive this message. They have lost the timidity that a lot of Democrats were criticizing them for. And of course the Bush campaign is ready for it and they're going to hit back just as hard.Aggressiveness...timidity...ready for it...hit back just as hard... Is she talking about a football game, or an election? This is as full-of-shit and meaningless as political journalism gets.
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