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Edited on Tue Feb-17-04 03:31 PM by stickdog
"Man on the street" testimonials are a tried and true journalistic conceit. Basically, you send out a cub reporter with a pre-determined angle and tell him to get enough man-on-street quotes to promote that angle -- with a few contrarians thrown in for good measure.
Many "man on the street" articles about primary preferences are written every week, and I've read over a hundred of them this year. They usually contain positive statements exclusively -- as in "I think Wes Clark is the man we need."
Yet in all of 2004 in all of the more than hundred articles I've read, I've yet to see a "man on the street" article that mentioned someone's cogently expressed support for Howard Dean without having at least one other respondent specifically say something negative about Dean. Furthermore, since these articles never contain more than one or two (at most) negative comments in their entirety, it's pretty jarring to see ANYTHING negative expressed. But if you do, it will be about Howard Dean's anger, or his temper, or his demeanor, or his arrogance, or his supposed duplicity or etc., etc., etc. In fact, in these "man of the street" interviews, I'd estimate that anti-Dean testimonials outnumber the total number of anti-ABD testimonials by far more than 10 to 1.
I mean, it's weird because Dean keeps chalking up 10-25% of the vote in every non-Southern contest. But the "man on the street" reporters just never seem able to find our intrepid Dean supporters. Are we all too busy getting computer tans or something -- or is support for Dean now something we like to keep to ourselves, like support for Pee Wee Herman?
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