A Must Read From Hugh Hewitt

Here's a slice of Hugh Hewitt's latest:


That's a shot from "Mittstock" in PA yesterday.  Not many of the pundits predicted a campaign close in Ben Franklin land.

My Washington Examiner column reviews the two stories that Manhattan-Beltway media elites are not eager to cover:  Mitt Romney's momentum and the continuing misery brought about by Sandy.
When the revenge, er, voting gets underway tonight in Dixville Notch it will be time for the MSM to drop any shyness about its boosterism and try to begin to push voters in a particular direction by calling states early for the president or late for Mitt Romney.  If Romney wins Florida and Virginia handily, for example, do you expect any of the nets to rush the call forward?  If Romney is leading significantly in Pennsylvania, will the "decision desk" folk hang back, and back, and back.
By contrast, if there is any way to get PA up on the president's board, don't expect the distant memory of Florida to hold back the embedded Obamaians.

Once the voting is over and we have a new president, then the full fledged media coveage of Sandy will begin again, just in time to see the new storm layer on the misery.  It will be more difficult to rally the country given the near "all clear" signal that has gone out in the four days.  The $23 million pulled in from the concert may have to do.  The sort of stories that ought to have dominated CNN for days will turn up with increasing frequency, but the message has gone out from the Obama-obliging anchors that "things are slowly getting back to normal," and it is very difficult to get the American attention engaged again once it has turned away.

It has been a very odd 72 hours of campaign coverage, with a faltering, sputtering Obama campaign defended by media forces led by the brave Nate Silver, almost single handedly turning back doom and gloom, and hurling fresh rounds of deadlocked polling at every attempt by the Romney forces to smile at each other.  As this media battle waxed and waned, prodicers would throw on a quick Sandy package, but nothing so dispiriting as to suggest the president shouldn't be campaigning.  Bizarre.  Another chapter in the collapse of American media.

As for the collapse of the Obama re-elect campaign, the crowds got very, very small, and Joe Biden got even more erratic.  Mitt Romney finished 1 in the Rasmussen tracking, with the president at 48%, the best sign of a very weak incumbent, and the Times ran a profile of a confident Romney, a hedge against their hopes and dreams fading Tuesday night. Don't let your lefty friends look at the internals from the CNN poll or they may not talk for the rest of the day.  (Hint: The independents are rushing to Romney.)

There isn't much to do but speculate, and I will do so with the usual suspects for an extra two hours today, joined in studio by Townhall's Guy P. Benson and Lileks as well as HotAir's Ed Morrissey as we warm up the band for tomorrow night's go-until-its-over marathon.
 
It all feels very, very good to me, like 1980 did, but it was much easier to stay optimistic in 1980 because the disinformation flow was so much more muted. The advantage of 2012 is that no MSM sneak attack like an early and wrong call of Florida will have anything like the same impact.

The rest up at the link.