Caucus Caution
December 31, 2007 at 5:27 pm
How much stock should we put in reporters’ analysis of the outcome of the Iowa presidential caucuses?
America’s most lovable political historian Lee Annis, author of “Howard Baker: Conciliator in an Age of Crisis,” smartly reminds of us what NBC News reporter Tom Pettit said after Ronald Reagan lost Iowa in 1980:
“I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead.”
Of course, that suggestion proved false. And it should make us eternally wary of what “experts” suggest even today.
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