MEDIA DESPERATE TO CLEAR THE GOP FIELD FOR CHRIS CHRISTIE

I'm happy to see that a new NBC poll puts Hillary Clinton 10 points ahead of Chris Christie in a 2016 presidential matchup -- but look at the lengths NBC is going to in order to declare Christie the GOP frontrunner:

Following his resounding re-election victory last week, 32 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents say they would vote for Christie in a GOP presidential primary, while 31 percent prefer another Republican candidate.

"Naming just Christie divides the faithful equally into Christie, Not Christie and Don’t Know," said G. Evans Witt, CEO of Princeton Survey Research, which conducted the poll.

So after NBC and all the other mainstream media outlets spent days gushing over Christie, NBC's polling unit conducted a GOP primary poll in which Christie was the only candidate named, and he "won"? We're supposed to take that seriously?

The standard line on the political press is that horserace-obsessed journalists inevitably have a vested interest in creating the perception of a heated battle under way, even when no battle exists, or the battle hasn't started yet. That certainly explains the ridiculous effort to gin up a Hillary Clinton/Elizabeth Warren donnybrook when Warren is showing no signs of running for president.

But this NBC poll seems to be an effort to create the perception that there isn't much of a battle in the GOP -- the GOP race is just Chris Christie versus a bunch of also-rans so insignificant they don't need to be named.

Well, no surprise. The mainstream press loves Christie. After five years of Obama with three more on the horizon, and with the potential for four or eight years of Hillary, the press is hankering for a Republican Daddy again. It wants a Daddy who doesn't seem to be that Republican, and who can take on Hillary -- Cruz and Paul and Rubio and the rest seem to fail both these tests.

So, yes, we have the mainstream media trying not to trump up what will be a real horserace on the GOP side, while trying to create a race that doesn't exist on the Democratic side -- anything to generate the perception that the icky old lady could be taken down and we'll be ruled again soon by a white guy who kicks down, with swagger.