US Election -- forget the conventional wisdom
Business Times - 02 Jan 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IF YOU'VE been following the media coverage of the current US presidential campaign and listened to the many predictions that have been made by the pundits, pollsters and political 'insiders' about which of the Democratic and Republicans candidate was going to win the nomination of his or her party, you may have concluded by now that the 'experts' seem to be always wrong. Indeed, at the start of the campaign last year, Washington's political professionals, reflecting the Conventional Wisdom (CW), were stating with quite a lot of confidence that Democratic New York Senator (and former first lady) Hillary Clinton and Republican Senator John McCain were going to emerge as the winners in the presidential primaries. Hence Democratic Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the young and charismatic African-American, was dismissed by the media as nothing more than a brief media sensation, a political upstart th