In 2004, the Democrats lost presidential election they ought to have won. But media avatars like the NYTimes, with Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman as direct mouthpieces, remain convinced that Red Staters and Bush are rubes. Could the loss be better understood, however, as the gift of media bias? The electioin was decided on national security and clearly, Bush was a weekened candidate. Failure to find WMD and an increasingly difficult to pacify Iraq last spring ensured a close election. But Dan Rather's phony memo scandal - leading CBS News to trumpet an obvious forgery as proof of George Bush's National Guard failure to serve - in the fall revealed a biased mainstream media bent on Bush character assasination. So how did these trends work to achieve a perverse an avoidable outcome? For almost fifty years Republicans have suckered the establishment with presidential candidates defined as "less than." From Eisenhower to Ford to Reagan and two Bush's, the notion that "these guys are" articulate but dim or inarticulate and dimmer has governed inside the beltway assessments of these presidents. But such misperceptions have almost always worked to these outsiders advantage. Consequently, character assasination of Bush caracatured the perceptions of the committed opposition. Over the last year, that caracature degenerated into a media mantra supporting the Great Lie of 2004: "Bush lied" about Iraq! From 2002-3, the media painted Bush' motives for the war in Iraq as either shifting or solely motivated by the threat of WMD. Bob Woodward's book "Bush At War" revealed Bush's alarm as centered on Al Qaida interest in getting and deploying nuclear weapons of terror. In a fear formula of A + B = X^2, Saddam had to go! Thus, when no WMD was found in Iraq, the urge to paint Bush' objective in Iraq as a failure proved irresistable, and people from Paul O'Neill to Joe Wilson and Richard Clarke were trotted out to seal this judgement. Yet even British historian John Keegan, in his history of the war in Iraq, readily acknowledged that the rationale for war was multiple, involving a panoply of at least five reasons. This makes "failure" far tougher to pin on Bush. And still the usual suspects, including the Washinton Post, believed that with "no connection" between 9/11 and Iraq proved Bush was wrong. Polls showed and continue to show that Fox News watchers were much more likely to believe in this connection than regular newspaper readers. Last year, this was paraded as a failure of the media to convey the facts to a hornswaggled public. The reason why a war on terror could not be pursued with Saddam Husein in power was, in fact, rooted in Al Qaida propaganda, and this was simultaneously simple and subtle. Every week, Iraq attacked US and coalition planes; every week, they defended. And every week, Bin Laden could point to the "Infidel occupation" of the Holy Lands (the US base in Saudi), and the 1 million Muslim lives lost because of the West's blockade of Saddam. (The figure was likely likely exagerated, but nonetheless effective terrorist propaganda.) How could the WOT make any headway with the vast cauldrin of Arabic speaking Muslim peoples as long as the unfinished business of 1991 festered so grusomely? Media bias led the Kerry campaign down the primrose path of hubris. Thus, when a campaign based on his medal winning Vietnam service came under grassroots attack with the Swiftboat Veteran's campaign, the pro-Kerry biographical wagons defensively circled. But Kerry never confronted these critics head-on - and electoral ground in the middle was lost and never regained. The mainstream media never outed Kerry with the fact that he lied about spending Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 - a key event in his autobiographical conversion into an anti-Nixon, anti-war peacenik. Thus, suspicions about Kerry's opportunistic character forever bubbled-up, undermining the trust needed to gain the undecided vote in a nation still at war. In short, trusting media bias doomed an arrogant Kerry campaign to lose an otherwise winnable presidential election. Presidential polster Pat Caddell echoed this complaint - and more. http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/iblog/C168863457/E1111873899/index.html Isolation, uncritical denial, arrogance, and classlessness characterized the Democratic party campaign - and an overly friendly media never saved them from the error of their ways. With an election decided on trust and national security, Democrats were victims of their own design. An avalanche of anti-Bush books, films, columnists, and talking heads could not avert a campaign denying the obvious.
