538 Asks: Where Did The Optimism Go?

Nate Silver calls some of the left's defeatism due to the delay of a health care bill the stupidest thing since Chris Weber's time out screw up at Michigan.

Silver writes:

"The media likes to talk about 'momentum'. It usually talks about the momentum in the present tense -- as in, 'health care has no momentum'. But almost always, those observations are formulated based on events of the past and sloppily extrapolated to imply events of the future, often to embarrassing effect: see also, New Hampshire, the 15-day infatuation with Sarah Palin, the Straight Talk express being left for dead somewhere in the summer of 2007, the overreaction to 'Bittergate' and the whole lot, and the naive assumption that Obama's high-60's approval ratings represented a paradigm shift and not a honeymoon period that new Presidents almost always experience."

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