So Barry, How Goes The War?

The War on FOX, that is.  According to Hot Air, not all that well. 

It’s a nine-percent bump in the two weeks since Anita Dunn’s whine heard ’round the world — in terms of overall audience. Among the coveted 25-54 demographic? A 14-percent bump. Good work, Barry. People keep telling me that this PR offensive by the White House benefits both sides but I don’t see how that’s true. If the goal is to contain Fox by framing the stories it breaks — Van Jones, ACORN, etc — as somehow illegitimate, then every tenth of a point that Fox’s ratings go up undermines that goal. There will come a point where other news nets will follow Fox’s lead simply for business reasons, ideology or no ideology; follow the link, eyeball the list of top 20 news shows, and ask yourself how far we are from that point, really. To put it in perspective: “Red Eye,” at 3 a.m., is beating Campbell Brown at 8 p.m. on CNN in the demo. (Worse, perhaps: Anderson Cooper is getting beat by … re-runs of Nancy Grace.)

In fact, CNN is now dead last in the prime time ratings.  Don Surber writes,

I have been reporting CNN’s bad numbers for some time and now it will be official when the October numbers are in, CNN is in last place behind MSNBC, HLN and you know who.

CNN’s numbers have dropped in half overall (52%) and 68% in prime time comparing October 2008 to 2009, TV by the Numbers reported.

In the 25-54 demographic, CNN dropped 62% overall and by 77% in prime time.

Even the mainstream press is now reporting it.

In the meantime Power Line takes note of the resurgent conservatives.

Conservatives are growing at the expense of both moderates and liberals. I suppose that's why the folks at CNN have so desperately tried to denigrate the tea party movement and town hall protesters.

This is, of course, the asymmetry of American politics: there are more conservatives than liberals, but more Democrats than Republicans. Hence the constant anxiety among Democrats that their party could crash and burn; hence, too, the frustration by conservatives that so many Republicans can't bring themselves to embrace conservative ideals.

Battle lines are currently drawn in New York, where a three-way race for an open seat in District 23 is in progress. Local Republicans nominated a liberal, Dede Scozzafava, to run against liberal Democrat Bill Owens in this historically Republican district. On its face this makes little sense: shouldn't a Republican-leaning district have ONE conservative on the ballot? Doug Hoffman obliged. Running on the Conservative Party line with support from the Club for Growth and other conservative organizations, Hoffman has quickly gone from spoiler to front-runner.

In the most recent Basswood Research poll for the Club for Growth, Hoffman has sprinted to a 31.3%-27% lead over Democrat Bill Owens. The liberal Republican, meanwhile, is sinking like a stone at 19.7%

Tom Maguire wonders if we could be looking forward to another 1994-like midterm election.

As an utterly unrelated thought, what was the lesson of the Clinton train wreck and Republican wave of 1994?  Was it "Don't run as a moderate and govern as a lefty", with gays in the military, the assault weapons bans, the vanishing middle class tax cut and the health care debacle as evidence? 

Or was it "Don't promise health care reform and then fail to deliver"?

Although it is rare to have a controlled experiment on this scale in the social sciences, it seems that Obama, Pelosi and Reid are poised to help answer that question.

I'm betting on option one.  Campaigning as centrists then governing as socialists is going to sink the democrats in 2010.  We're looking at the writing on the wall.

Comments

[Shirley]

I'm inclined to agree with your conclusion. I just hope the Republicans can get their act together in time.