On The Turning Away

When the Spectacle is everywhere, the spectator is nowhere at home.
- Guy Debord (1931 - 1994)

Quote of the day:

“I am going to continue to support Senator Clinton, but leaving the Democratic Party and voting for McCain is now officially my Plan B.”

- A comment left on Taylor Marsh’s website.

The obvious answer is plenty, judging from yesterday’s frenzied responses to MediaMatters’s petition calling for MSNBC “to change the demeaning tone that its coverage all too often takes and truly address this disturbing pattern once and for all.”

Inauspiciously, however, MSNBC may have been too clever by half in its cynical “controversies as part of an advertising campaign to promote its political coverage”, if comments to NYObserver’s “Primary Scream” are any guide.

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville also called out Arianna Huffington for her eponymous HuffPo’s not-so-subtle anti-Hillary sexism. Money quote,

“There’s nothing more unattractive than a successful woman who uses sexism to try to subvert other women.”

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If there’s a celebrated leitmotif so far in this primary season, it’s the media postmortem of “mea culpa” in the Dems race. As Tom Brokaw conceded on MSNBC last night, “in all of our conventional and collective wisdom, we were wrong.”

In the days leading up to Feb 5, Obamania almost had you believe that Sen. Clinton would be pushed out of the race by losing Mass., New Jersey and California, among others. (New Hampshire, anyone?) However, Super Tuesday voters appeared to know a way to get pundits’ goat. If anything, yesterday’s results raise a legitimate question of Sen. Obama’s elusive (so far) big-state appeal.

In Massachusetts, the ballyhooed triumvirate (Sens. Kennedy and Kerry, Governor Patrick) for Sen. Obama failed to thwart Sen. Clinton a convincing win: 56% vs 41%. Craig Crawford has more.
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