by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
One more piece in my series on press coverage (previous installments here, here, and here), and then I promise I'll go find some polls to crunch.
The third bit of insight needed to understand the DC press corps is the latest field guide to the institution itself. Today, that field guide Mark Halperin and John Harris's book The Way To Win. Halperin has been something of a whipping boy in the blogosphere, with good reason; he's symptomatic of bubble of DC "conventional wisdom" that is convinced that ideas outside the DC status quo are "unacceptable", cause candidates to "fail the test of commander in chief", he openly states that "Matt Drudge rules our world", etc. But that makes the book a useful descriptive analysis of how the media operates, rather than a prescriptive recipe for the way it should operate.
