Thursday, May 12, 2011

the newt kid on the block

the weirdest thing about gingrich's presidential campaign is that he will probably be treated as one of the top-tier candidates. he's going to get a lot more coverage than people like herman cain and yet newt probably has about the same shot of ever being president as herman or the other second stringers.

it used to be a total mystery to me how the press decided which candidates were in the top-tier and which were not. i've since become convinced the distinction depends on two things: (1) whether the pundit class has declared the candidate to be "crazy" or a "loser" yet (see e.g. dennis kucinich), and (2) whether the candidate is already in the establishment media's rolodex. if the answer to those questions are "no" and "yes", then we have a top-tier candidate.

newt is definitely a yes to question #2. i can't figure out why he isn't be a "yes" to question #1.

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ASIDE: just after i wrote this post i noticed that the blogger spell checker recognizes "Gingrich" but not "Kucinich". just throwing that out there.