The conventional wisdom is already congealing around results in the Nevada and South Carolina presidential contests yesterday.

 
On the Republican side, the line is that John McCain’s win in South Carolina last night is comeback and vindication, after his 2000 loss to George W. Bush marked by extreme campaign ugliness by Bush tacticians including Marvin P. Bush, the president’s youngest brother.

 
On the Democratic side, the line is that Hillary Clinton’s ‘victory’ in Nevada was awarded by women and Latinos, as proclaimed by the Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray and Anne Kornblut this morning and, instantly, by CNN last night.

 
A little depth makes the story more interesting.

 
Actually, John McCain got far more votes in South Carolina in 2000 than he did yesterday. He did better in 2000 against George Bush--except for not winning. In 2000, McCain drew 237,888 votes in South Carolina, 42 percent of the total against 301,050 for Bush, 53 percent. In 2008, McCain drew only 143,224 votes in South Carolina, 33 percent of the total.

 
I was somewhat surprised that McCain came out ahead in South Carolina, but the arithmetic of the divided field was inexorable. This time, he faced six opponents whose combined total beat his by two to one--a much more substantial margin than that of GWBush in 2000--but no one of whom got enough to beat him.

 
It is worth noting that GOP turnout in South Carolina was much lower in 2008 than in 2000. In 2000, the vote in the Republican primary exceeded 565,000. This year it fell slightly below 431,000.

 
This in SOUTH CAROLINA? To say the least, 2008 looks good for Democrats. Small wonder the corporate media outlets, some party insiders, and much of the financial sector have coalesced around the Clinton candidacy.

 
Speaking of Dems, nothing has cropped up in ‘news analysis’ pieces so far about Bill Clinton’s effect on motivation and turnout in Vegas and surrounding areas. These being the Clintons, they are smoke-screening their own tactics with accusations—false, it might be noted--that Obama supporters were trying vote suppression against Vegas casino workers.

 
Of course, the large media outlets are also still saying nothing about the vote anomalies in New Hampshire. But then the WashPost has still not caught up on election problems in 2000 and 2004. (See the excellent work of BradBlog, Kathy Dopp in USCountVotes, other nonprofit groups, and Professor Steven Freeman.) And—while we’re at it--some WashPost reporters are still pretending that there was a ‘Dean scream’ in 2004. Even Al Kamen keeps throwing that one out there, and his work is often excellent. No mention of the mega distortions in that meme, no corrections. Damn the public.

 
But then the Post also has yet to report that it had a huge financial stake in GWBush’s ‘education reforms’ and thus in GWB’s candidacy (through the Post Co.’s ownership of Kaplan).

 
Some of these corporate news people seem to be under orders, too, to bury John Edwards. Bob Schieffer and Tim Russert have allowed him airtime, to their credit, but Chris Matthews and his panelists, Dan Balz, David Broder and Dana Milbank at the Post, most of the team at CNN, etc, seem locked into the two major tenets of news-lite groupthink: first, the insistence on a two-man race—the hell with the voters, if they are still voting for more than two men, then the race is ‘chaotic,’ ‘confused.’ And second, the niche-politics, identity-politics mindset. Needless to say, re Clinton, the equation of women + Latinos safely outnumbers African-Americans, who are well on the way to being presented as being Obama’s only supporters. So much harm to this country . . .

 
The U.S. has much work to do, even aside from protecting 98 percent of the population from the ravages of further consolidation of resources in the hands of the top two percent—protect the integrity of the vote, protect research into 9/11, complete the examination into the lead-up to the Iraq war. We need to reverse some of the encroachments on American civil liberties of the past three administrations—Bush, Clinton, Bush—not just the current one.
 

But the WashPost, like corporate media in general, is congealing around the nontransparency candidate. That would be the Bush-lite Clinton candidacy, ever triangulating, never sharing with the public.

 
It is too early to make any predictions about 2008. But if we end up with a race of Clinton against Romney (or Clinton-Obama against Romney-Thompson), we will have a contest of Cover-up Queen and Cover-up King.