Fast Freights and Side Rails

In covering the race, the media play the "expectations "game

ABC's Peter Jennings used two of them in an opening paragraph on Super Tuesday. So did CBS's Dan Rather. NBC's Tom Brokaw employed a couple of them too, and his colleague Roger Mudd followed with a whole string. The popular words and phrases were variations on that old stand-by of political reporting, the expectations game—this candidate did better or worse "than expected," that candidate "had to" win here or capture some specified percentage of the vote there—and they set the tone for the evaluation...