More from the strange world of TV news. I was watching CNN and Wolf Blitzer was talking with a reporter regarding how Elizabeth Edwards has been diagnosed with breast cancer. They got to talking about Ms. Edwards in general:

BLITZER: He’s been a longtime spokesman for the Edwards campaign, in supported of Elizabeth “is as strong a person as I’ve ever known. Together our family will beat this.” She’s a very impressive woman, an attorney in her own right. She’s done some pretty remarkable things over the years.
HENRY: That’s right. She was very impressive to a lot of Democrats and Republicans when you talk to them, just as Laura Bush has been — has impressed Democrats, as well as Republicans, with her aplomb on the campaign trail and as first lady. And what they say is that Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer, is very accomplished, but also has children, older children, as well as younger children that we saw on the campaign trial, and that she has been very accomplished both as a mother, and as a professional in her own right, and that’s why, obviously, a lot of sadness right now at the Kerry/Edwards campaign, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer right in the middle of the difficulty campaign itself.

I’m not sure why Henry uses the “what they say is that Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer.” She is a lawyer. She has an older daughter and two young children. Henry doesn’t need to attribute these known facts to some campaign statement.
But more importantly, what does this story have to do with Laura Bush? Absolutely nothing. So why is she brought up? I suspect because this is just one of many reporters who has been programmed not make any sort of value statement about a person on one side of the campaign without saying something similar about the other side. Whenever they offer a subjective comment about one candidate–positive or negative–they reflexively must “balance” it with an in kind remark about their opponent.
Thus, if Dick Cheney says he never implied a link between Iraq and 9/11, duty requires that a reporter can’t point this whopper out unless he devotes equal time to point out that Edwards misstated the amount of money allocated in a three-year-old spending bill. So it always works out that both candidates are equally untruthful.
Lame.
Anyway, best wishes to Elizabeth Edwards. She seems like a wonderful person.

Word is that it will be Senator Harry Reid.
I agree with the wide-spread belief that the Democrats should select someone from a “safe” blue state who will have the latitude to be an outspoken advocate for Democratic policies. There’s no question that Daschle was handicapped because he had to appeal to his conservative constituency.
I don’t know much about Reid’s leadership style or Nevada politics, but according to this criterion it sure seems like Senator Durbin or Dodd would be a better choice.

Apparently, we are responsible for the media’s crummy early exit poll results:

News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race.
. . .
[P]eople who read these numbers – among them, thousands of ordinary Americans with an intense interest in the election – put too much faith into them and leaped to conclusions, said Bill Schneider, CNN’s polling expert.
“I think people believed them, and it’s particularly the case with Internet bloggers,” said Kathy Frankovic, CBS News’ polling director. “That’s unfortunate because it sets up expectations that may or may not be met. I think it’s a good exercise because it reminded people that early exit polls can be unreliable.”

Of course. We’re not smart enough to figure out what poll numbers mean without those brilliant network political analysts to filter those complex numbers for our digestion.
Speaking of which, was it just me, or did most of the TV talking heads on election night offer only the most obvious conclusions as returns rolled in. If you wanted to figure out how a close state was going, you were better off looking up the returns yourself and comparing those numbers to how the state had voted in 2000. Lot of good those experts are when they only make calls on the obvious states.

There’s no small irony in the fact that despite the media’s nearly exclusive focus on the “war on terror” over the past three years, and despite the corresponding effort to cast President Bush as the steel-spined commander in chief who protects us from the WMD-welding Iraqi terrorists, some of Senator Kerry’s strongest support came in the areas most directly impacted by 9/11.
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C.–the areas which suffered the most from terrorism, and which continue to be most vulnerable to another attack, all went for Kerry. Obviously, other factors play a role in this. But it is interesting that the “day that changed everything” didn’t have much of an impact on the political preferences of those nearest Ground Zero.

Clearly things did not go yesterday the way I anticipated or hoped they would. In my defense, I’ll note that I’m not the only person scratching my head this morning. For example, John Zogby ended up picking Kerry to pick up the same 311 electoral votes as I did. And he gets paid a lot more to do this kind of thing than I do. And even the early exit polls were apparently off.
So what happened? A few things stick out in comparing the exit polling to the 2000 returns:
(1) Women: The gender gap shrunk as Bush picked 4% among females.
(2) Latinos: Among Hispanics, a growing segment rumored to be trending to the Democrats, Bush actually picked up 7%.
(3) Young voters: The “new” voter group, which favored Kerry, simply didn’t turn out as had been advertised. Only 11% of those sampled were first-time voters.
(4) Catholics: Went for Bush over the Catholic candidate.
(5) Issues: “Moral values” was deemed the most important issue by the largest percentage of voters, out pacing “terrorism” and the “economy.” Despite all the hoopla concerning 9/11, the God, guns, and gays threesome still appears to drive many people at the polls.
What to make of this? Clearly, the Democratic party is in disarray. Not only did it fail to win against an incumbent with sub-50% approval ratings, but it sustained a huge blow in the Senate. Simply put, it wasn’t even competitive in a huge part of the country. That can’t continue. Even the things that the Democrats appeared to have working in their favor this year–the 527s and the Internet/based get-out-the-vote activism–simply didn’t deliver at crunch time. In some ways it was reminiscent of the vanishing Deaniac movement in the primaries.
The Republicans will undoubtedly declare this to be a huge mandate. But a mandate for what? The GOP succeeded in making this election a contest of image: the strong commander with resolve versus the weak flip-floppy liberal. Bush didn’t campaign on a detailed second term agenda. I’m sure the think tanks and special interests have stuff waiting in the pipeline, but it’s not what Bush ran on. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans will come out with their agenda immediately, or wait for another terrorist attack to ram stuff through.
Another four years of incompetence isn’t a pleasant thought. I just hope the long-term damage to foreign relations, the supreme court, and environment won’t be too severe.