I've been thinking about the press coverage of Reverend Wright's recent speeches, in particular the coverage of the major cable news networks and the NYTimes, though I'd suspect what holds true for these outlets holds true for most media. All agree that there are two priorities that, at times, conflict with one another: getting a certain candidate elected (Obama) and that candidate or other high-profile people linked (however vaguely) to the candidate being able to speak their minds. How much must one sacrifice in order to get elected? How many games does a candidate have to play?
To answer the question, you have to look at the poll numbers. Its a common complaint that the public is too focused on poll numbers, not focused enough on the issues, and this is b/c the news media frames elections as "horse races." I think that heavy use of the "horse race" frame (which emphasizes poll #s over all else) leads to more frequent/larger shifts in those numbers. That is, the more self-aware a public becomes of its opinion, the more likely it is to shift. The reasons for the shift are essentially arbitrary. It might be Reverend Wright, it might be "bitter-gate." There will always be something that either the competing candidate, the news media, or bloggers who support the competing candidate will exploit, either to get their candidate elected, to raise their own stature as "opinion leader," and/or to boost their ratings and make a profit. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's Spiral of Silence sums up this brilliantly. Its a must-read for anyone who is genuinely trying to understand why the primary is going the way it is going.
Fluctuations in polls are not due to the larger public's reaction to an event (like Wright's "controversial" remarks on race), nor are they the inevitable result of increasingly visible poll numbers per se (hating the pollsters and the NYTimes for posting poll #s gets us nowhere). The larger public reacts to professional interpretation of minor fluctuations in public opinion. First, the media (main stream or bloggers, doesn't matter) select an event which they can interpret as "controversial" enough to plausibly effect voter opinion. Then they limit their polling to one small but purportedly influential segment of the general populace (undecideds, superdelegates, other bloggers, white working class females between 25-40 since last Tuesday). How long this time period is and what the event happens to be are of no consequence. Both main stream media and bloggers will dig until they find an event that can be spun as controversial and a small enough sliver of the public to show that there is some movement in the polls that is plausibly correlated to that event. In doing this, they justify their own existence. They are the source of information about public opinion, and our conception of public opinion is, for better or worse, what we base our voting decisions on (if you don't believe this, read Noelle-Neumann's book).
This creates a cycle: larger and larger segments of the population accept the premise that public opinion is being altered by the event, making the connection between the event and public opinion ever more plausible.
It becomes acceptable (perhaps laudable) to change one's position on a candidate. This is the "change" election in the sense that voters are expected to change their opinion on candidates several times over the course of the year.
Why does all this work against Obama? Maybe b/c he was ahead, and favorite-toppled-by-underdog makes for a more compelling story than underdog-can't-come-back, which is why both candidates were trying so desperately to frame themselves as underdogs. It doesn't help that most people who publicly rush to Obama's defense are perceived by many as elite (the digerati, the NYTimes).
I think that the new technology and the ways it allows information to spread changes how public opinion fluctuates and so it changes how our leaders are elected. The first step is to understand how it works, to give up, for a moment, our dreams of perfect democracy or a perfect candidate as well as our nightmares of a totalitarian mainstream media cabal. Just take a step back and try to see how it all works. Then you can make your value judgment and think about how you might change the system. Personally, I think that the way out of this bind is...another technological innovation. I've seen innovations on assessing user demand work on small scales, on YouTube or within online communities that introduced wiki-ratings or similar widgets. Different tools, all under the heading of "new media" or "internet," can change the flow of public opinion and could get us to recognize how we're all shaped by public opinion and yet all have the power to resist it and decide things based on judgments of the candidates and the issues.
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