| Yesterday, HuffPost had an article on superdelegates. There are a few things they didn't mention. There's a backstory to how DCW came to be, and how it came to be "THE" source for superdelegates. I'll leave that to history, because eventually there will be a lot of books on the intricacies of the 2008 election.
What history will say is that there were these two guys who, first, KNEW that the superdelegate race would matter. Not everyone did (most famously, Mark Penn.) They then committed to tracking not the NUMBER of superdelegates, but the number by NAME. They developed colour-coded lists, and when they said that person A stood with candidate B, they had proof. (No matter how many times the delegate may have changed his or her mind.) DCW was the only place with names. Everyone has guestimates, DCW had actual facts.
The list work itself was technically painful, as well as painstaking, owing to the issues with working with tables in Blogger. Plus, the lists needed daily hourly work and updates. It took a lot of time. And while, yes, Matt and Oreo are political junkies, they also both have actual lives. (Honest: jobs, families, and theoretically a need for sleep.) In addition to the superdelegates, there was the research they did on the convention itself. And, believe it or not, Matt originally created this site as a place for anything and everything about the convention itself: site selection to execution, with no detail spared. This was the first place to publish that the acceptance speech would be at the stadium. It was written as a rumour, but Oreo had actual confirmation. I joined Matt and Oreo last June to help with the convention posts. As I told them then, I stand in awe of the work that they did: then, now, and always. They showed a commitment to truth and transparency, their work was meticulous, honest, and devoid of any personal leanings. At a time when the superdelegate race mattered, for the only time in history, and the mainstream press fell down on the job, Matt and Oreo spent hours on hours on data collection, write-ups and tracking. No one else did what they did. In May of 2008, a piece came out with video of the NBC room where they kept their superdelegate lists, in hand-writing, on big pieces of paper, on the walls. I had the opportunity to ask Chuck Todd why NBC didn't use spreadsheets, like DCW did. He assured me that Tim Russert insisted they have spreadsheets. And that they really did. I asked him why they didn't publish the actual names, and he mumbled something about that not being the way they decided to go. It was understood implicitly that for the MSM "relationships with sources" trumped the public's right to know. Matt and Oreo did it right. Per the numbers, millions of people viewed the work that they did. We, the political junkies, have always appreciated it. My guess is that history will, too. Because of Matt and Oreo, we all knew what we would not have known otherwise. I know I speak for millions when I say: thanks, guys. It would have been a whole other primary season without you. Update from Matt: Kudos to Oreo, who first came up with the idea of publishing the list, based on an early list of congressional endorsements from, I think, Roll Call. It first went up just around the Iowa caucuses, and honestly, at the time, we had no idea superdelegates would matter. Good thing we were wrong! |
