After two more decisive victories by Sen. Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination, making it ten in a row, WaPo and NYT bloggers both ran stories about the Clinton campaign’s strategy (6-point plan! 8-point plan!). The strategy, evidently, is to disavow losses and attack viciously, the party be damned. I’m not sure what is more dispiriting, the rise of bitter, divisive politics so early in the campaign or the media’s inability to understand a transformed electorate. In nearly 300 comments on one such article, one would be pressed to find even 10 percent in support of HRC. This is not to say that she is without her ardent supporters, but that many often fall outside of the educated, often-affluent and blog-savvy generations that form the bulk of the readership. These readers, not privy to conference calls from either campaign, seem to grasp kernels of common-sense in the race that have thus far eluded many of the people employed to cover it.

Two comments from the above:

What are Hillary Clinton’s notable accomplishments as a Senator? She managed to finagle her way onto the Armed Services Committee in preparation for a White House run? She’s had three major issues in her political history. 1st- she failed on healthcare, by running some hyper secret, jam it through, Cheney-like operation, except she wasn’t as effective a political operator as Cheney, so the “jam through” failed. 2nd- she made the wrong vote on the biggest foreign policy blunder in modern history, and then somehow decided to give the Bush/Cheney team another blank check on Iran. 3rd- in the most important executive position in her life history, running her own campaign for the White House, she’s been outrun, out raised, out strategized, and out campaigned. Why does this qualify her to be chief executive of the nation? Because she’s memorized her policy initiatives? This is about leadership, and being able to look forward, not back, to see the future obstacles, not recount her own mistakes, which have been numerous, particularly on the biggest issues.

– Posted by Nelson Yu

Hillary needs to give it up, and the media needs to stop promoting her agenda. For all the talk of the media treating her unfairly, if Obama had gotten avalanched in 10 straight contest[s] the media would have been written him off. What’s fair is fair. The media needs to stop making excuses for Hillary. Here it is a day after Hillary got blown out again and i cant even find two positive articles about Obama. I am a white male but i must say that if Obama was not black and he had won like he is winning, the media would have declared him the democratic nominee by now.

– Posted by semajh

Any person who wants to be president of this country certainly deserves to be examined under the closest of scrutiny. The job of examination, one of the most important in a democracy, belongs to the media. And in the age of the blogosphere, the media’s unofficial straw boss is this guy:

The Fifth Estate sounds a bit off, but should there be a name?