by WonkoKevin

Headline gotcha’, didn’t it?  One thing I’ve noticed from my time in the blogosphere is that (a) titles make a difference in traffic to the post, and (b) titles are often more “out there” than the rest of the post.  Given the opportunity of 10 or 100 or 1000 words in a post to say something outrageous, often the most outrageous statement is in the title rather than the post.  Here’s today’s excellent advice from Jeff Fecke at Shakesville:

Barack Obama’s campaign is doomed right now, as it has been for about seven days, and everyone knows that whether Obama or Hillary Clinton earns the nomination, they’re not going to beat John McCain. Snap polls taken over a one-day period prove it.

But you know, out here in the real world, far from the fevered pitch of the blogosphere, people aren’t talking about Obama’s Tuesday speech, or Clinton’s old agenda, or McCain’s gaffe. Oh, they may have heard this or that about that or this, and it may affect what they think today. But that’s today.

Tomorrow, something else will happen that will change the calculus so that only Barack Obama can win the nomination, and John McCain is doomed. And next week, Clinton will be on her way to certain victory. And the week after that, McCain will be on top again, and so it will go until the ultimate Democratic nominee is selected, and heor she starts targeting McCain directly.

At that point, polls will start to have meaning. We will see if Obama supporters will really turn against Clinton should she win the nomination, or vice versa. We will see if sharp and direct attacks on McCain force the press to notice that he’s got a lot of room to be attacked. We will start to see only then, and we will not know for sure who will win until November.

But this week’s story is this week’s story. It is not the story of the campaign. Settle down, everyone. There’s a lot of time between now and then.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 7:11 am and is filed under Horse race, Politics 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.