Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Pundits Sweep to Victory in PA Primary

(AP) Philadelphia - The mood in the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Philadelphia Downtown was tense until around 9:04. A standing room only crowd of 2,950 people waited with baited breath as, on the large screen at the end of the hall, CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced his network's projection that Hillary Clinton had won the State of Pennsylvania.

Speaking from the rostrum, D. Allen Kosiyefsky founder and owner of popular internet political blog "The Beltway Bandits", called the announcement "A Victory for the cause of Punditry across this nation and a clear sign of the American Public."

"We came here today in the face of great odds, but, with your help, we have managed to squeeze out a win that will allow us to move on to Indiana, North Carolina, and even Puerto Rico, and to continue parsing demographics, citing anecdotes as proof, trivializing the significant, signifying the trivial, and generally fill up otherwise empty space across all media."

Many Pundits across the country had felt that a win by Obama would have put in jeopardy the ongoing narrative that had been constructed surrounding both he and Senator Clinton. The national narrative, which said that Clinton held an insurmountable lead in the Democratic Primary, had already been rewritten four months earlier after Obama's surprising finish in the Iowa caucuses. Other Pundits believed that even with a 5% margin of victory, the Clinton camp would have had to have pulled out of the race, citing a diminishing reserve of cash and an inability to connect with the average white male voter in a very blue collar, high school educated, barely-able-to-dress-one's-own-self, state.

With such a clear margin of victory, however, Pundits are looking forward to another two months of Democratic primaries to work on.

Adrianne Farfington, of the Farfington Plotz - an influential blog among liberals with too much time on their hands - called the extended primary "a relief".

"I think what most Americans don't realize is that punditry is literally keeping this country's economy afloat. With the loss of major manufacturing and the downturn in the housing industry, the only thing that we as a nation are actually producing is bloviation. In fact, we are the number one bloviaters in the world, followed distantly by the French, and the British. Indeed, with thousands of cable news channels and an uncountable number of websites, without punditry nearly 90% of "content" disappears. That immediately translates into a loss of billions of dollars in marketing and ad revenue that are churned out into the general economy. Ending the primary now means a 5 month lull in election related content, which could not be filled -- even by pictures of cats with captions on them"

Others disagree.

Barfy the Wondersponge, who is a regular poster on Farfington Plotz, argues that "TEH ELECTIONS ARE NOT ABOUT WHAT THE PUNDITS SAY BUT WHO WERE ARE VOTING FOR I THINK THAT YOU ALL ARE MISSING TEH POINT AND ARE RUINING AMERICA."

Mr. Kosiyefsky, however, remains optimistic.

"We're looking for a good run in Indiana. We think that Obama could pull this off, but it'll be a struggle, given the propensity of the urban areas to vote Democratic and the outlying areas to vote Republicans. However, with places like Bloomington and Gary, you're going to see a real focus on the effects of the economy. Indeed, 47% of voters, when asked, felt that the other 53% of voters didn't know what they were talking about. But hey! I have two more weeks to make up this shit; there's no need to shoot my wad now."

No comments: