Conventional Wisdom Eats Itself
Here’s how it works. Nearly a year before the first vote is cast, write a story about how a candidate has a complicated relationship with one of his most obvious bases of support based on soft early polling and anecdotal chatter from self-appointed spokespeople. Meme propagates. Then, two months later, still 10 months before the first vote is to be cast, write a story about how – “surprise!” – that invented meme may have actual been premature and idle speculation and, you know, we’ll see.
To make a long story short: it turns out black people probably do like Barack Obama after all. For now.
Whatever Drudge's breathless hype yesterday (is someone at the NYTs leaking to Drudge to prime the pump for big stories?) or HuffPo's headlining, or the NYTs itself's front-paging might have you think, there's nothing surprising here. That New York's black leaders are reconsidering their "loyalty" to Hillary as a result of both their constituents enthusiasm for Obama and his solidified cred as a "serious" candidate strikes me as only interesting if you had digested and internalized the premature conventional wisdom.
Are we really that surprised that Al Sharpton and Stanley Crouch don't actually speak for a diverse and complex population of 35 million Americans? That the dynamics created by some chatter in January necessarily had anything to do with on the ground politics 2 months, much less a full year, later?
It's APRIL!
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