I wanted to write a few notes on why I set out to write on all the contests in the 2012 Republican Presidential Nomination. Well, originally, that isn't what I set out to do: I set out to make writeups on the first few contests, which I thought were momentous enough to be covered. And then the race stretched out and became more interesting, and I didn't see any specific reason to stop. I have to admit that there are a few contests that I don't really have much content for: there is not much I can say about North Dakota, but if I am going to cover some of them, I might as well cover all of them. Someday, this might be important.
More importantly, for me, it goes back to what I wrote in Lowering the Bar: Internet Discourse in the Age of Facebook. The election has caused all sorts of commentary, from the professional pundit class to my liberal friends on Facebook who for a week or so, regularly alerted me to the fact that Rick Santorum was not the type of guy who was going to be joining a vegan transsexual commune any time soon. And there has been many predictions and speculations, much of which has been disproved in two days. But who cares? Its the internet! Comments and posts slide downward at astonishing speed. Even the pundit in Time Magazine who said after New Hampshire that Mitt Romney had sewn the whole thing up has probably moved on to new predictions.
There is a lot being written, almost all of it very transitory. I am noding for the ages here. I have tried to be rather modest with my analysis and predictions, because these aren't random comments on news articles that will be forgotten in 12 hours. People will be reading this, I hope, for a while. In some ways, I am writing this to test myself: will what I write about these events in a week, a month, a year, seem ludicrous? So far, I think I have managed to keep my predictions and analysis at a level of modesty that I wish more of the professional media would adopt.