As Howard Dean said with his usual trenchancy, the race for the Democratic nomination is a race for 2,025 delegates. “Whoever gets there first will be the next president of the United States.”

So far, Barack Obama has breached two significant obstacles to 2,025 imposed by media representations:

 I.                    The 50-50 fallacy

When presented with two and only two alternatives, people tend to try to split the difference. If you step on one scale saying you weigh 300 pounds, and step on another scale saying you weigh 350 pounds, then your correct weight must be 325, right?—This is fallacy, but many journalists seem particularly prone to it, driving toward an average rather than toward accuracy.

The instant effect of reducing the Democratic race to Clinton and Obama was to homogenize them, to make each seem half of a 50-50. Allegorizing Obama and Clinton as ‘change’ and ‘experience’ does not shed much light. It should be self-evident that the public desperately wants a change from Bush-Cheney, and also that any public official is desired to possess some level of competence and skill.

The net effect works to Obama’s detriment, because it tends to downplay the extraordinary and to promote the ordinary.

Media coverage of ‘Super Tuesday’ was a good example. Obama won thirteen states--Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, and Utah. Clinton won eight states (nine after NM was counted), including the two largest—California and New York—on which her campaign had been banking from the first.

Obama and Clinton each won more than 7 million votes, Clinton a tiny percentage ahead, her plus coming entirely from California and New York. With California and New York out of the equation, Obama led Clinton by more than 400,000 votes.

Obama came from as much as 30 points behind, in some states, to close ahead of or even with Clinton.

Here is the lead in the Washington Post about this outcome:

“Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won victories over Sen. Barack Obama in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York last night, giving her presidential campaign a crucial boost. But Obama countered by winning a string of states, including the general election battleground of Missouri, in the seesaw race for the Democratic nomination.”

For the past year—more than a year before a single vote was cast--the MSM narrative was always that Clinton, gifted with probably about half a billion $ worth of free media from 2003 on, was the ‘front-runner’. Obama got to be somehow an insurgent, a challenger to an incumbent. You would think he was some former first lady who decided to run for president.

Lost to view in the MSM narrative is the series of problems undercutting several Clinton victories:

·        In California, hundreds of thousands of votes cast by officially non-partisan voters in the Democratic primary may not be counted. The looming problem has the California Secretary of State and other officials looking into it.

·        The Nevada caucuses were influenced by Bill Clinton’s asserting that Las Vegas casino workers reaped an unfair advantage by having caucus sites in their workplaces.

·        Commentators have repeatedly asserted that ‘the polls were wrong’ in New Hampshire, but a possibility remains that the polls were in fact not wrong. Anomalies in the New Hampshire primary call the apparent win by Clinton into question. A partial recount did not address differences between precincts counting ballots by hand and precincts counting by optical scanning.

·        Clinton ‘won’ partial contests in Michigan and Florida by leaving her name on the ballot in those states after other candidates withdrew theirs, when MI and FL violated DNC rules by moving their primaries to the front of the calendar. The Clinton campaign is now opposing a plan by the Democratic National Committee asking Michigan and Florida to hold caucuses, so that their states can seat delegates at the national convention.
 

II.                 Niche-ifying the candidates

Worse than ‘change’ versus ‘experience’, Clinton and Obama have been presented in terms of identity politics, woman versus African-American.

On the morning of ‘Super Tuesday’, conservative commentator Joe Scarborough was one of several commentators rehashing 'identity politics' in re Democrats and giving the women’s vote to ‘Hillary’ and the black vote to Obama.

This dichotomy never entirely benefited either candidate—or the Democratic Party—but for the simple reason that women outnumber African-Americans, it favored Clinton.

Worse, the news media have used the ‘identity politics’ line to justify racist representations, often understating Obama’s draw among white voters, while ominously underscoring his appeal for African-Americans.

Beyond that, for three or more weeks of primaries the media almost wholly adopted Clinton talking points that Clinton is supported by women and by Latinos. The partial truth in both these propositions became oversimplified, overstated, and self-fulfilling—again favoring Clinton, for the simple reason that women and Hispanics add up to outnumber African-Americans.

Following every primary contest up to the Chesapeake primaries of Maryland, D.C. and Virginia on Feb. 12, commentators cited exit polls showing Hillary Clinton stronger with women, Latinos and seniors. That those differences were less pronounced in caucuses, which Obama mostly won, received scant attention.

In a closer analysis, the Latino vote splits along generational and language lines: English-speaking Hispanics who read English-language periodicals go more for Obama, Spanish-speaking Hispanics who rely on Spanish-language television go more for Clinton. This more subtle divide is key:

The Information Gap

No one has publicly pointed out a common denominator linking women, Hispanics and seniors, that all three groups are statistically less likely to augment their information with Internet use. Numerous studies historically show the differential of gender and age in computer literacy. There is also a ‘computer gap’ between Anglos and Hispanics. The differentials are not all-or-nothing and are rapidly diminishing. But for now, they still exist.

In other words, the common denominator linking the groups thought to break for Clinton—including high-school grads--is their statistical reliance on the MSM for their news and information. People who are Internet-savvy enough to broaden their access to a much larger pool of information break for Obama. This divide is not just a matter of Netroots. The gap is between people likely to be informed via Internet, and people forced to rely on corporate media outlets. Anybody who relies entirely on television news will not hear about, for example, the questions concerning New Hampshire’s optical scanning machines.

Therefore Obama had to close the information gap--as his campaign has done brilliantly so far. The pattern has been that the more Democratic voters learn about the two remaining candidates, the more likely they become to break for Obama.