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From The New Editor:

The CBS News/New York Times poll has both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton leading John McCain in head-to-head races by five points.

According to the poll, Obama leads McCain 47% to 42%, with Clinton leading McCain 48% to 43%.

As always, it is important to see how the poll’s respondents break down by party — a look which shows that those questioned self-identified 39% Dem, 28% Repub, and 33% independent in the unweighted sample. The weighted sample broke down 40% Dem, 26% Repub, and 34% independent.

The unweighted sample shows an 11-point margin for the Dems, while the weighted sample shows a 14-point margin.

Two ways to judge the accuracy of the poll’s 11-point margin favoring Dem respondents might include some historical perspective of other presidential elections and how the CBS News/New York Times poll did forecasting the last national elections.

In the 27 elections since 1900, four Democratic Party presidential candidates won by more than 10% points: in 1912, Woodrow Wilson won by 14.4% over a split Repub ticket of Theodore Roosevelt and President Taft; in 1932, FDR beat President Hoover by 17.8%; in 1936, President Roosevelt beat Alf Landon by 24.3%; in 1964, President Johnson beat Barry Goldwater by 22.6%.

In the 2006 mid-term elections, when the Dems beat the Repubs by about 7.5% in the aggregate House vote, the last CBS News/New York Times poll before the 2006 mid-terms forecast a Dem margin of victory of 18%, missing by about 10 points.

Viewing the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll through those two historical prisms might give added perspective on the accuracy of this, most recent poll.

Krauthammer:

…In his swoon-inducing Philadelphia speech, Obama had instructed the nation from on high that America was greatly in need of a national conversation on race — a need curiously absent before his pastor’s words sent his campaign into a tailspin — and that he, Barack Obama, was ready to lead it. Everything was now on the table, except his association with Wright. Because to “play Rev. Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election” would simply be a “distraction” from the suffering of the American people which, of course, is the work of the usual suspects: corporate outsourcing and “the special interests in Washington.”

This invitation to move on, as it were, has been widely accepted. After the speech it became an article of faith that even referencing Wright’s comments was somehow illegitimate, the new “Swift-boating.”

It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to “work the low road.” You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary’s commenting on Wright “a new low.” You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.

But from the mainstream media? As National Review’s Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is “legitimate” for her to have remarked “that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost” or the kind of “generic comments (Wright) made about white America,” Anderson Cooper, the show’s host and alleged moderator, interjected that since “we all know what the (Wright) comments were,” he found it “amazing” and “funny” that Davis should “feel the need to repeat them over and over again.”

Davis protested, “It’s appropriate.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with “Lanny, Lanny, you’re spreading the — you’re spreading the poison right now,” and then suggested that an “honorable person” would “stay away from this stuff.”

Amazing. We’ve gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright’s bigotry and ask how any man — let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency — could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.

Watching such a display, you get a full appreciation of Hillary’s challenge. The mainstream media are back in the tank. The “Saturday Night Live” skits parodying media obsequiousness toward Obama, followed closely by the revelation of the Wright tapes, temporarily forced the media to subject Obama to normal scrutiny. But after the “speech” and Tuzla, they have reverted to form as protectors of the myth of Obama.

The hagiographic treatment of a newly emerged Democratic leader is a recurring theme in American journalism. At the dawning of the age of Clinton 15 years ago, the cover of The New York Times Magazine featured a woman dressed entirely in white. The heading read: “Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Politics of Virtue.”…

Good for CBS news, although I doubt they would be pressing the story if they didn’t have another Dem to root for.

Hillary appears completely blindsided. Even after the story has broken she keeps spinning, making up another lie to try to cover the first. The story of her life.

Probably the best indication things are improving in Iraq - the media don’t want to talk about it much any more. From Pew:

According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% of the newshole in July to just 3% in February.

From today’s WSJ:

The fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer holds many lessons, and the press will surely be examining them in coming months. But don’t expect the press corps to delve into the biggest lesson of all — its own role as his enabler.

Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr. Spitzer’s stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer, in my mind, is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press. “You play hard, you play rough, and hopefully you don’t get caught,” said Mr. Spitzer two years ago. He never did get caught, because most reporters were his accomplices.
[Spitzer’s Media Enablers]

Journalism has many functions, but perhaps the most important is keeping tabs on public officials. That duty is even more vital concerning government positions that are subject to few other checks and balances. Chief among those is the prosecutor, who can use his awesome state power to punish, even destroy, private citizens.

Yet from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan — all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more.

Time magazine bestowed upon Mr. Spitzer the title “Crusader of the Year,” and likened him to Moses. Fortune dubbed him the “Enforcer.” A fawning article in the Atlantic Monthly in 2004 explained he was “a rock star,” and “the Democratic Party’s future.” In an uncritical 2006 biography, then Washington Post reporter Brooke Masters compared the attorney general to no less than Teddy Roosevelt….

….Mr. Spitzer’s main offense as a prosecutor is that he violated the basic rules of fairness and due process: Innocent until proven guilty; the right to your day in court. The Spitzer method was to target public companies and officials, leak allegations and out-of-context emails to a compliant press, watch the stock price fall, threaten a corporate indictment (a death sentence), and then move in for a quick settlement kill. There was rarely a trial, fair or unfair, involved.

On the substance, his court record speaks for itself. Most of Mr. Spitzer’s high-profile charges have gone up in smoke. A New York state judge threw out his case against tax firm H&R Block. He lost his prosecution against Bank of America broker Ted Sihpol (whom Mr. Spitzer threatened to arrest in front of his child and pregnant wife). Mr. Spitzer was stopped by a federal judge from prying confidential information out of mortgage companies. Another New York judge blocked the heart of his suit against Mr. Grasso. Mr. Greenberg continues to fight his civil charges. The press was foursquare behind Mr. Spitzer in all these cases, and in a better world they’d share some of his humiliation.

Instead, remarkably, they continue to defend him. Ms. Masters, his biographer, was on CNN the day Mr. Spitzer’s prostitution news broke, reassuring viewers that the governor really was a “lovely” guy. Other news reporters were reporting what a “tragedy” it was that such a leading light in the Democratic Party could come to such an ignoble end….

I haven’t yet seen anyone make the obvious comparison between Spitzer’s downfall and that of Mike Nifong. Both grossly abused their respective powers as public prosecutors. And in both cases most of the press actively aided and abetted them as they used unsubstantiated accusations and threats in an attempt to distroy innocent people’s lives.

Of course, in both cases they were crusading for the Left.  Somehow the MSM gets all bent out of shape on the details of how warrants to listen in on suspected terrorists are obtained, yet they applaud a certain type of real, overt abuse of government power.

From Sunday’s Boston Globe:

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. “2007 to be ‘warmest on record,’ ” BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government’s Meteorological Office, the story announced that “the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,” surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold….

…Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn’t turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007’s global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it’s up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO₂ is the cause of climate change…

You’d think the alarmists in the media would get smart and stop publishing short term predictions. And it wasn’t just the BBC that was writing about how hot 2007 was supposed to be, so were:

Reuters
AP
IHT
MSNBC
CBS
USA Today
The New York Times
The New York Sun
The Washington Post
National Geographic
CBC
The Guardian
The Independent
China People Daily
ABC Australia
Discovery Channel
Science Daily
Met Office

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