Campaigns & Elections

Today's starter topic: Writing at the Ace of Spades site, pseudonymous blogger Gabriel Malor makes the case that policy issues in the campaign were not what won the day for President Obama. Instead, it was trivial, manufactured controversies designed to inflame low-information voters:

Editorial note: As always is the case but bears repeating, Miss Coulter's opinions do not necessarily reflect those of NewsBusters. We spent billions of dollars and billions of words on an election to switch from President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House to President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. Every election predictor was wrong, except one:…

Should Republicans unilaterally disarm in the media-bias wars?  Joe Scarborough seems to think so. Arguing that it distracts Republicans from performing the political blocking-and-tackling needed to win elections, Scarborough has called on Republicans to "stop blaming the media." Saying "let's makes this personal," Scarborough cited as an example of the supposed distractions to which he was…

Now that their guy will be in the White House for another term, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has apparently commenced its "Cleaning up Benghazi" project -- as, naturally, has the Obama administration. As part of that effort, the wire service's Greg Risling, reporting from Los Angeles at 6:14 p.m., made only the vaguest of references to how the film "roiled the Middle…

Bob Schieffer poured cold water on President Obama's victory during CBS's post-election coverage on early Wednesday morning: "He's not going to have a mandate here. The President has been re-elected, but nobody's put the stamp of approval on his program. I mean, when the vote is this close...he's going to have a very, very difficult time." Schieffer repeated these same points on Wednesday's…

In his page A51 November 7 column, "Voting on same-sex marriage, with the Book of Leviticus ringing in my ears," the Washington Post's Courtland Milloy explained how, as a child raised in the "Bible Belt during the 1950s with that Old-Time Religion," he's still haunted by "Leviticus, that strong-arm book of the Bible that for years has tried to dictate my thoughts and actions through fear and…

On the same night he apologized for making a horribly inappropriate comment about Hurricane Sandy, Chris Matthews on Wednesday had Bill Maher on Hardball to compare Karl Rove and Republicans to Nazis. After Matthews wondered about Rove's erroneous predictions, the liberal comic mocked, "It was a little Hitler's bunker, wasn't it? I wanted to rush in with a cyanide capsule there. I thought he…

In his "Winners and losers from Election 2012" feature filed at his paper's website on Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza concluded that foreign policy in general was a "loser" in the campaign, failing to move votes (emphasis mine), "Despite all of the media attention that Libya drew in the final month of the campaign, foreign policy was an afterthought — at best — for…

Reacting to Democratic Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren's victory in Massachusetts, CNN's Ali Velshi gushed on Wednesday morning, "I have to say, regardless of party, good for her." "She prevailed. She got crushed and now she's going to be a U.S. senator," he noted her prior setback, when she failed to become the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [Video below the break. Audio…

With President Obama's election win, the worldwide celebrations have commenced again. NBC's Today show documented as much as they possibly could on Wednesday morning. Reporting from London, foreign correspondent Michelle Kosinski was tasked with narrating the story of how the election has been perceived and reported overseas. Eerily similar to four long years ago, jubilant residents from…

CNN contributor John Avlon dumped on Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) early Wednesday morning, when he quipped that she was re-elected on "a bad night for wing-nuts." "And I mean, look, it was a bad night for wing-nuts last night, but Michele Bachmann is straight through in a redrawn district that was drawn to be more conservative," Avlon said after CNN projected that Bachmann would win re-…

Now that the 2012 presidential election is over and Barack Obama has been safely reelected, the journalists at ABC's Good Morning America woke up to the fact that the President has "refused" to provide details the terrorist attack in Libya and that the administration "didn't want to talk about it." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Fill-in host Elizabeth Vargas blithely announced, "In the…

On Wednesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd cited Florida as evidence of "this demographic time bomb went off and caught the Republicans off guard," referring to the Hispanic vote in Tuesday's election. He then predicted the same "bomb" could go off in other states in the future: "...it's going to happen in Georgia....Texas and the state of Arizona..." [Listen to the audio or watch…

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's reelection, the lecturing and advice from the liberal media began on Wednesday's Good Morning America. ABC analyst Matt Dowd mocked the GOP as a "Mad Men party in a Modern Family America." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] (The Mad Men reference is to the AMC series set in the 1960s. Modern Family is a gay-friendly sitcom on ABC.)  According to Dowd, "And…