Projections

Senate - Republican John Sununu loses in New Hampshire, Dole loses in North Carolina, but Dems won't have 60 as McConnell hangs on in Kentucky, as does Chambliss in Georgia.

Former Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen won a rematch for the United States Senate, defeating incumbent Republican John E. Sununu in a bitterly fought campaign that attracted attention and money from across the nation.

NBC called the race for Shaheen, who will become the first female US senator in the history of New Hampshire.

Barack is taking New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. This indicates that the McCain isn't going to play out. Florida is in Barack's column, by 8% with a third of the vote in, but McCain is up 10% in Virginia with 38% reporting.

As the polls close on the east coast, Barack Obama is sweeping through Northeast states and is projected to win Pennsylvania, a battleground state that John McCain saw as a potential key to winning the election.

The economy was the number one issue to voters, according to early exit polls.

(AP Photo)

Besides Pennsylvania, Obama is also projected to win New Hampshire, another state where McCain campaigned in closing days in the hopes of capturing its electoral votes.

Other states projected to be in Obama's column according to exit polls are Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington DC, Delaware, Illinois, and three of Maine's four electoral votes.

McCain is projected to win Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina and Oklahoma.

Obama's projected victory in Pennsylvania which has 21 electoral votes was a blow to McCain's White House hopes. While it was carried by Democrat John Kerry in 2004, McCain had hoped to turn it into a red state.

"We're going to win Pennsylvania tomorrow and I'm going to be the President of the United States," McCain said at a rally Monday. "Pennsylvania will do it, and Pittsburgh will be the important area."

Twisting

Barack the Contortionist twisted himself through New Hampshire yesterday, pretending to take an anti-tax pledge in a state that expects it's politicians to make real anti-tax commitments.

At a town hall-style meeting in blue-collar Dover, he told about 325 supporters and independents, "I pledge to you that under my plan, no one making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not income tax, not capital gains taxes, not any kind of tax."

McCain "can't make that pledge," he said, because the Republican McCain would tax health care benefits.

McCain's campaign fired back that despite his pledge, Obama "has voted 94 times for higher taxes during his short tenure in the Senate. That includes tax increases on people making as little as $42,000 a year."

It's tough to have a campaign based on issues with a candidate who is on every side of every issue.

On Media Bias

Since most Democrats have always argued that media bias doesn't exist - that it's a fantasy of the conservative mind, and worse - that it's impossible - it has been a satisfying year for those of us who advance the theory.

It was very exciting when Democrats themselves, in the form of the Clintons, complained about how they were treated in the media compared to Barack. Bill was downright bitter before the New Hampshire primary when explaining, in response to a voter question, whether Hillary would join Barack in calling for a new kinda politics.

"Nobody would be happier to see all this go away than us. But you can’t ask somebody who is at a breathtaking disadvantage in the information coming to the voters to ignore that disadvantage and basically agree to put bullets in their brains," he said.

Saturday Night Live did such a nice job spoofing Hillary's newfound media irrelevance that the media was impacted.


Now, of course, there's the Obama World Tour, dutifully covered by the three networks by sending their anchors along, when McCain's overseas trips have received virtually no coverage.

"If this were John McCain's first trip to the war zone, that would be a story and we would cover it big time," said Paul Friedman, the senior vice president of CBS News.

Okay. That's a point. But don't the networks still have an obligation to maintain some level of balance?

The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that three newscasts by the traditional networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent 114 minutes covering Obama since June; they spent 48 minutes covering McCain.

It is, I believe, the combination of two factors that leads to the lopsided Obama coverage. One is the fact that reporters love the guy. But then there's the issue of commerce.

The news industry's fascination with Obama has carried over to general-interest magazines, with the candidate landing on considerably more covers in recent months than has McCain. In the last couple of weeks Obama has graced the front of Rolling Stone and, for the second time now, that of Us Weekly (both of which are owned by the company of a prominent Obama supporter, Jann Wenner).

Covers are responsible for people making spontaneous grabs at magazines.

Beth Jacobson, a spokeswoman for Wenner Media, said they were among the better-selling magazines of the year.

Ned Martel, the deputy editor of Men's Vogue, said, "He's what is called in the magazine world an 'interest driver.' " The magazine put Obama on its cover in 2006 and has recently dispatched the photographer Annie Liebovitz to produce another spread for an upcoming issue. It did do a feature on McCain in 2006 as well; it did not make the cover.

Whatever the reason, the media is failing to do its job properly - in a big way.