Lil’ Luke and the Crown Jewel
by digby
My piece in Salon this morning is about the Village press coverage of the election, specifically Luke Russert on election night and why they got the story completely wrong:
They’ve sent Luke Russert into the field. Yes, you read that right. Rather than just exploiting his very special gift for repeating the conventional wisdom he hears in the halls of the Capitol building, he’s now reporting out in the real world. A couple of weeks ago they seasoned him by having him do a stand-up in front of an airport terminal to report on Ebola. And then they told him to pack up his “sage of Capitol Hill” act and head out to Iowa.
Being a reporter of great depth and insight, upon landing in Des Moines, he managed to immediately glom on to a prevailing story line, which he repeated over and over again. As Talking Points Memo pointed out in this piece, Russert blew into Iowa and serendipitously discovered that the likely winner of the race he’d been assigned to cover in the last two days of the election was also destined to be the newest Kingmaker of the Republican Party, the fantastically exciting new GOP politician named Joni Ernst. Once he discovered how “charismatic” Ernst was it was obvious there was absolutely no need to discuss the issues in the race or the more general state of politics in the state. Ernst was “riding the momentum” of her charisma to victory and we really didn’t need to know anything else about it.
In fact, he skipped right over the race itself and moved on to declare her the GOP’s “kingmaker” because she’s from Iowa and all the candidates will have to come there to kiss her ring. No, he didn’t offer any explanation as to why being Iowa’s freshman senator made her so powerful to potential presidential candidates; it was apparently assumed that we would all instinctively understand it.
Read on for bonus Chris Hayes analysis that throws a bucket of cold water on the heads of all those who think this election changed anything.
.