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Why I Can't Take the East Coast Media Seriously When They Pretend To Take California Seriously

By Earl Warren

On a day when all the candidates are in California, we find this geographic oddity in the very first line of a Slate article on the state of the campaign:

For the first time today, all of the presidential candidates are east of the Mississippi.

How about free maps for all political journalists!

It's fun for everyone when the DC media mob -- which occasionally goes years without making it west of 36th & M in Georgetown -- starts to write deep-think pieces about California. Alas, we're in for 120 hours of bad puns ("The candidates head to La-La land..."), cliches ("It's hard to campaign in a state as diverse as California"), decades-stale demographic pronouncements ("In order to appeal to Latino voters, the candidates will stay in San Diego and Los Angeles"), incorrect political pronouncements ("The Schwarzenegger endorsement of McCain will go a long way with hard-core Republican voters in California who have their doubts about the Senator's conservative credentials"), misunderstood highway denominations ("Obama will then head down the 101"), the conflation of different regions ("Reaching out to his Silicon Valley constituency, Obama campaigns at Glide Memorial in San Francisco "), and general medicinally induced wonder ("Wow, this is a big state.").

I'll keep my eyes peeled for the best (worst) in East Coast pundit-ing about us, but I invite readers to do the same.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).