Dear voters, You're fired
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Voters, come in, please. Take a seat. We need to have a little talk.
Listen, you've done some great work over the years, you really have. The entire country owes you a huge debt of thanks. But on behalf of the news media, the Washington pundits, various powerbrokers, assorted columnists, and esteemed talking heads, I have some news that it doesn't give me any pleasure to give.
You're fired.
No, I know, it seems abrupt, but it really isn't. We've been thinking about this since we caught you having that illicit fling with John McCain. The bottom line is, you're unreliable, and this electoral system needs to be fixed.
Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars we spend on polls? We have national polls, state polls, tracking polls, rolling polls, rolling tracking polls, tracking rolling polls. And when we use irrefutable science to determine exactly who wins what race and why, you willfully ignore the memo. So there's the problem: You're not paying enough attention, and I don't mean to the boring candidates. To us.
You're sure not paying enough attention to the roughly 50,000 fund-raising stories and analyses we've provided over the last year that have told you exactly why Howard Dean is going to walk away with the nomination or why Wes Clark still has a chance or why John Kerry has none at all. Forgive my tone of incredulity, but how could you possibly ignore the crucial fact that some candidates can already afford to advertise in New Mexico while others can't?
So let me ask one simple question: Do you have any idea how much it costs to house and feed R. W. "Johnny" Apple and the rest of the New York Times newsroom in Des Moines for a week? Are you aware of what the Suites of 800 Locust charges a night? Do you know that cuts of beef at the 801 Steak and Chop House run somewhere north of $35 apiece? You think Richard's Bistro in Manchester is cheap?
And for what, all this money? So you can vote any way you want and make us look like idiots?
I don't mean to pile on, but didn't you realize that we dismissed Kerry's candidacy with a steady stream of bitterly snide and snarky jokes many months ago. Did you fail to see that the firing of his campaign manager in November was the biggest story of the decade and that his appearance on Leno showed that he couldn't possibly win?
Likewise, did you miss the whole Dean coronation we held? Didn't you know that with all that Internet money and all those kids in orange, he couldn't possibly lose? Did you ignore how often the news magazines had him on their cover?
How do you think all this makes us feel in the news business? Well, I'll tell you exactly how it makes us feel: jittery. We're up here in New Hampshire long past the time when we like to call things done, and you keep getting in the way. Dean's down, Dean's up. Kerry's surging, Kerry's sliding. Who do you think you are, waiting until Primary Day to make up your mind?
Now we've got million-dollar-a-year analysts on national television hedging their bets. What gives you the right? And some people are starting to think this thing might go one primary, one caucus at a time, until a candidate wins enough delegates. Obviously, the system's broken and needs to be fixed.
So you're out. We don't have enough for severance, but here's a limited edition DVD of the McLaughlin Group and the Capital Gang facing off in a steel cage debate in Madision Square Garden, political discourse at its best.
And what will we do instead, you ask? We'll still head to Iowa and New Hampshire for the quirky campaign events. Great visuals, what with the snow-covered fields and the flannel shirts, exactly as the Founding Fathers would have wanted it.
But on caucus day and Primary Day, we'll have a new mantra, something a little more appropriate for the Information Age: "We Report, We Decide." And nobody gets in our way.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
