Journamalism and the Pack

TPM posts the AP story that Dodd drops presidential bid after failure to break from Democratic pack

'Failure to break from the pack'?

Dodd did not fail to break from the pack, he scored 0.02%. That is not failing to break from the pack, Dodd never came close to reaching the pack. He barely managed to cross the starting line.

Biden is also out but Richards and Thompson are both staying in the race. I don't expect Richards to last much longer but as with Kucinich it does not much matter whether he is in or out. Hopefully the TV stations start only inviting candidates who have either polled 5% or more in the primaries to date or are curently polling above 5% nationally. ABC is almost doing that, but they made the mistake of inviting candidates who place in the top four spots in Iowa or 5% in NH or national polls, that makes little sense when the difference between third and fourth in Iowa was 30% to 2%.

Thompson staying in the GOP race is much more significant, if he had left there could well have been a mass exodous. Instead it looks like the six pack will stick together through Super-Tuesday. That could well mean an acrimonious brokered convention for the GOP.

If the Obama surge continues and Edwards stays in contention we might in theory see a brokered convention for the Democrats as well. I don't think this is likely though. The race will start to tip and when it does there will be a deal.

The biggest loser on the GOP side however was Fox news. It is going to be really hard to see why Paul should be excluded from the Fox news debate when he trounced Giuliani in the actual vote in Iowa, is running far ahead of Thompson in the polls and out-raised the rest of the field in the last quarter. From now on its not only going to be liberals referring to Fox as Faux News.