New Hampshire wrap-up

The media are still trying to analyze what went wrong with their polling there, how they could have been so very wrong.

The New York Times seems to be saying it was…the process more than the pollsters.

The factors conspiring against pollsters included the convergence of two historic candidacies, those of a woman and an African-American.

Factors don’t conspire against pollsters. Pollsters blew it.

They also faced the compressed election calendar, with only five days between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary; Saturday night’s debate, and Mrs. Clinton’s unusual moment of her eyes welling with tears on Monday.

On top of that came the long-acknowledged perils of so-called tracking polls, including their relatively high margins of error.

Excuses. And the Times also seems to be saying it was all those other media folks who tripped up.

But the polls tell only part of the story of why reporters for news organizations like Newsweek, The Washington Post and MSNBC, among others, led their viewers and readers to believe that Mr. Obama was on the verge of an easy victory in New Hampshire.

“Others” including the New York Times? They didn’t go there.

But they did point to Time.

“I think the press for a variety of reasons has strong favorites in each of these two races,” Mark Halperin, an editor at large for Time magazine, said on “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television Tuesday night, in reference to both the Democratic and Republican primaries. “They strongly favor Senator Obama. They strongly favor John McCain.”

I give him credit for his honesty. The media are biased. And they can’t help it.

At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Joel Achenbach, a reporter for The Washington Post who had been covering Mr. Obama in New Hampshire, posted a mea culpa on the newspaper’s Web site.

“Count me among those who thought Obama was a runaway train, that he’d blow Clinton out of the water,” Mr. Achenbach wrote. “You had to see the crowds! Feel the energy!”

The night of the Iowa caucuses, everyone seemed to be gushing about this revolution happening in America, with Obama leading the charge. Even some conservative analysts on Fox News were saying that. But they have settled down a bit.

“O.K., so in retrospect a lot of those people were probably college kids on break from Massachusetts or Maryland,” he added. “Still many of us sensed that we were witnessing history, a transition to a new era.”

They still are. Which is why some of the veterans of many former campaign seasons are giving advice to their successors.

In an exchange with Chris Matthews on MSNBC not long after Mrs. Clinton concluded her remarks on Tuesday night, Tom Brokaw seized on a different issue. He seemed to suggest that Mr. Matthews and others working in more traditional media might be feeling too much pressure to read voters’ minds, especially in the Internet age.

“You know what I think we’re going to have to go back and do?” Mr. Brokaw asked, in a clip that was later widely e-mailed by those critical of the press’s performance.

He answered his own question: “Wait for the voters to make their judgment.”

I predict that’s not going to happen. It’s a runaway train.

On the other hand, there are those refreshing few analysts who keep it short and….er…blunt.

Looking at the winners and losers on the Republican side, I don’t see a lot of the former coming out of New Hampshire:

Romney lost, because he came second, which is starting to look like a pattern;

McCain lost, because his margin over Romney is, as noted below, underwhelming enough to get his comeback written off as little more than a local phenomenon;

Huckabee lost, because a distant third with no evidence of an Iowa bounce makes his caucus victory seem ancient history;

Giuliani lost, because he barely beat Ron Paul;

Paul lost, because he couldn’t even beat Giuliani;

Thompson lost, because he’s a big-time Hollywood guy with a hot primetime TV show and, even if he were totally incompetent, that ought to be worth more than one per cent.

Oh, well. On to Michigan, which is sure to have its own novel ways of damaging the “front”runners.

Maybe it’s time to get behind Alan Keyes.

Did you hear that Alan Keyes is running?