If you only get your news from the cadre of liberal journalists who call themselves the “mainstream media,” you no doubt think that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney probably ought to throw in the towel by now.
Subconsciously and otherwise, the left-leaning elite media has been eagerly trying to place the Romney campaign into an early grave, despite numerous polls showing that the race is far closer than it would be be after months of journalists doing their best to hammer Romney on the outrage du jour put forward by liberal blogs and Democratic election consultants.
As Wes Pruden, editor emeritus of the Washington Times put it yesterday in a column:
A few more "really bad weeks” like last week for Mitt Romney, and somebody will have to stick a fork in President Obama. He'll be done.
Despite the pounding the former Massachusetts governor took from the president and the media, he moved from 5 points behind last week in the Gallup Poll to a dead-even tie at the end of the week. Pruden noted that Rasmussen, whose different methodology has made it consistently the most reliable of the polls, called the race dead-even as well.
To take a poll, a pollster first has to build a model, a pool of voters to reflect the voting population. He uses the results of the previous election, or elections, to identify and select the voters to put in his demographic pool.
"Pitfalls abound," Pruden said. "Black voters, based on previous elections, typically cast 11 percent of the vote in presidential elections. Four years ago, they made up 14 percent of the vote. Young voters doubled their vote from 2004 to 2008. Yet nearly all pollsters are basing their models for this year on the 2008 vote."
However, some of the data from a number of surveys favors the Romney/Ryan campaign.
Nearly all of them ... find a large "enthusiasm gap" between Obama voters, discouraged by high unemployment and disappointed by his performance, and the Romney voters. Many Romney voters are lukewarm about their candidate but red hot about the prospect of defeating Obama.
The former Massachusetts governor's recent streak of negative coverage from the media began when he was slammed by "freaked-out journalists" over Romney's comments on the administration's "disgraceful" response to the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Libya, which ended with the murder of ambassador Chris Stevens.
Soon after, a recording of Romney talking at a fund-raising event depicted the Republican candidate as aloof and uncaring because he stated that 47 percent of Americans don't pay income taxes and are so dependent on government handouts that they'll vote for President Obama no matter what.
The GOP candidate's latest brush with the media took place this past Friday, when the airplane carrying his wife Ann had to be grounded temporarily because the main cabin filled with smoke from what was later determined to be a small electrical fire.
"I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don't think she knows just how worried some of us were," Romney said.
When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go, exactly, there's no -- and you still can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft because the windows don't open. I don't know why they do that. It's a real problem.
That statement drew fire from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow who appeared outraged at Romney and couldn't fathom the possibility that he might be joking.
Michael Hayne of the newjerseynewsroom.com website chimed in to charge that the "bumbling Republican presidential candidate seems to believe that the air at 30,000 feet is just as fresh and breathable as it is at ground level."
"We can now literally say that Romney has his head in the clouds," Hayne quipped.
However, Jason Howerton of TheBlaze site spoke with William Everitt, vice president of Investment Real Estate Associates (IREA), who attended the fundraiser for Romney in Beverly Hills on Saturday.
"Basically, he was retelling the story, and when he said, 'I don't know why they don't have roll-down windows,' he looked at the audience, and everyone laughed." Everitt told TheBlaze: "There were 1,000 people there that will tell you the same thing, that Romney was absolutely joking when he said he doesn't know why airplane windows don't open."
"If what Everitt is saying is true," Howerton wrote, "this could be an instance where a gullible media jumped at the opportunity to make Romney look stupid."
Stay tuned for much more completely fabricated "gaffes" supposedly made by Romney as the campaign moves along. At the end of the day, just as they've done with their polling this cycle, the American press is apparently willing to sacrifice its credibility in order to boost Democrats.
