My Eyes Are Tired

My eyes are tired, but that's just about what it takes to get beyond the loaded phrases, couched terms, arched references, veiled threats, tilted arguments and foregone conclusions to see what is really going on these days.

I email a small cadre of friends a missive every couple of days that seeks to piece together in one place a complete look at the primary races.

Even though I live in Georgia, the South Carolina race was closer to my heart - after all, its my home state. I eyeballed the returns county by county, cutting and pasting them into a Word file. Then I took a look at the most recent census figures I could find that broke down each county's residents by race, age, and gender, cutting and pasting them in underneath the corresponding county's primary returns.

What you saw there two weeks ago is what you are seeing now - but only if you looked at the raw data for yourself, because the media spin doctors, who attempt to pass themselves of as journalists, create more spin than the professionals the campaigns are paying.

After seeing several of my emails, my best buddy called me one day and blurted out "the media is bullshit" before I could say hello.

I don't even watch the talking heads much anymore. I am spending way, waaay too much time trolling the polling sites and the county by county results in each state to sort of "take their temperature" with my own thermometer.

Obama running neck and neck with Clinton is a lot like the Giants hanging with the Patriots all the way to the two minute drill. "This guy/these guys aren't supposed to be here."

I give kudos to the Obama campaign strategists - they have broken this down to man-to-man defense, running a full court press in practically every state against Goliath, and it is working.

Couple that with Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy he put in place the last couple of years and the brand new voters the party has been helping to cultivate are coming out of the woodwork, people whose habits have not been tracked before, people whose influence is being measured after the fact for the first time.

Its going to be a dogfight to the end.

The only way to know this, though, is to scroll past the pie charts and moving average graphs to the raw numbers themselves - they tell you what's really going on.