Clinton's “Downturn:” Conventional Wisdom?

Over the past month, and despite some ups and downs, the prediction market Intrade.com is showing the following:

• Clinton, up (and still the overall market leader)
  
• Edwards, down (a nickel stock)
  
• Obama, down
  
• Giuliani, up (still the Republican market leader)
  
• Romney, up
  
• Thompson, down (crashing into nickel stock territory)
  
• McCain, up (another nickel stock)

If you're wondering how Clinton's "debate stumble" and/or the others holding her feet to the fire is affecting her numbers, well, the results are mixed. While many of the polls show a decline in her support, a nearly-equal number of polls show nothing of the sort. Regardless, her lead is still in the double digits.

Chris Bowers has a round up and offers an excellent analysis as well:

I imagine most people reading this blog are either happy that Clinton is somewhat down, or at least not disappointed. However, they should be careful what they wish for.

In this case, what appears to be a Clinton drop in the polls was largely fueled by the same media machine that, most of the time, happily reinforces Republican narratives as conventional wisdom. The lesson here, I think, is to remember that the corporate, established media is still very good at creating national convention wisdom as they see fit.

While in this case that conventional wisdom might make many people in the netroots happy, most of the time it won't. It is still a powerful institution that Republicans and conservatives are better able to control than Democrats and progressives, and we shouldn't forget that.

After the fact re-branding of debates remains of the biggest reasons George Bush is President instead of Al Gore, for example. Their after the fact coverage of Howard Dean's concession speech in Iowa, or General Petraeus's rosy portrayal of Iraq are even more gratuitous examples.

Most of the time, it feels as though the conventional wisdom machine works against us, and even in instances where we might enjoy the conventional wisdom that is being created (and I admit that I enjoy it simply because a blowout campaign is a boring campaign), we shouldn't forget that.