Monday, September 24, 2007

Polls

Bowers makes the obvious-but-needed-to-be-made point that generic liberals are going to eat your babies messaging is going to impact support for any Democratic candidate and therefore there's nothing special about how it impacts Clinton and Obama (or how they impact downticket races).

Which is why if Cillizza and the Devil had run this tidbit from a Republican pollster it wouldn't have been as offensive, at least if they'd written it up a bit better. Clinton and Obama are the current frontrunners, so Republicans pointing out poll-tested messaging which hurts Democrats would be fine, if a bit of a dog bites man story. But here we have a pollster for a rival Democratic candidate, not labeled as such, using the information to imply there's something about the specific candidates, when it's really just a generic exploitable narrative about all Democrats.