http://www.dailyhowler.com/Last night, Olbermann brought out Rachel Maddow, one of the perfectly-scripted players he presents every night. Could anything possibly be more gruesome than seeing a liberal cite Patrick Healy? Maybe not, but that’s what Olbermann did—and then he asked Maddow to explain “the Clinton electability argument.” It has two components, Maddow said. We’ll focus on the second part—on what she called “the numbers argument:”
MADDOW (4/24/08): Well, it has two components—there’s a biographical component and there is a numbers component. The biographical component is that Barack Obama is not as vetted as Hillary Clinton is. And even though we all can imagine or have nightmares about what kind of slime the Republicans might bring against Hillary Clinton in the fall, it pales in comparison to what they might throw at Barack Obama and how damaging it would be because he’s inexperienced in facing it. So, that’s the biographical argument.
The numbers argument is that Hillary Clinton’s strength in some swing states so far in the primary campaign indicates that she would be stronger against John McCain in those states than Barack Obama would. The two that she usually cites now are Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the implication is that by winning in those states—in those states the Democrats historically have to win in order to get the presidency, Hillary Clinton has shown in the primaries that she would be stronger in the general.
It’s a simple argument. It doesn’t necessarily bear out historically. I mean, you can ask Michael Dukakis how he felt in November 1988, looking back and hugging himself thinking how good it was that he won the Pennsylvania primary that year when he came nowhere near winning the state in the general election. But those are essentially been the two arguments she’s put forward.
We’d call that less gruesome than most Countdown fare. And yet, it’s groaningly weak, the kind of thing that has long characterized the world of the mainstream press corps. In her refutation, Maddow starts by mocking Michael Dukakis, “hugging himself” in November 1988 as he recalls his Pennsylvania primary win. She then mistakenly says that Dukakis “came nowhere near winning the state in the general election.” (In fact, Bush beat Dukakis in Pennsylvania fairly narrowly—by less than three points.) Of course, none of that is even vaguely relevant to the actual claim of the Clinton campaign—the claim that Clinton would have a better chance in Pennsylvania this fall than Obama would. In her presentation, Maddow argued an irrelevant point; she “proved” that the person who wins a Dem primary may not win the general election in that state. Of course, no one would ever be so dumb as to challenge that obvious fact—and that isn’t the claim she described before she began her refutation. But on Countdown, this sort of thing is standard fare. On Countdown, every fact—every argument—supports the preference of the host. As noted, this presentation was considerably less dumb than a good deal of what Olbermann shovels.
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