MSM Returns to Power

[T]his is not the first time Democrats have tried to personalize their message around an unpopular Republican figure. Starting in 1996, the poster child was Newt Gingrich. . . And Democrats have tried this tack before against Mr. Bush, in the 2004 election. . .But what [Bush] had going for him in [2004] was Sen. John Kerry. . .In 2006, there was no way for Mr. Bush to turn the questions and doubts about him into a comparative question.

--Todd Lindberg, Washington Times

The mainstream media (MSM) can’t win an election on its own. But make a mistake, and the MSM will get you. Particularly if you are a Republican playing to a conservative base. Particularly if you took us into an elective war.

The modern “politics of personal destruction” seemed to begin in 1988, with Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton commercials against Michael Dukakis. But the MSM had by 1988 already brought down Johnson, Nixon, and, somewhat without thinking, Jimmy Carter as well. 9-11 briefly threw the MSM off-stride, but when Bush went into Iraq, the MSM started an uninterrupted effort to drive down Bush’s poll numbers, and drive him from office unless he left Iraq first.

Success in Iraq would have pushed the MSM off-stride again. And that was (and remains) Bush’s most urgent task—succeed in Iraq. Iraq success would have overcome the absence of WMD, the Plame Affair, the failure to kill Osama bin Laden, Abu Ghraib, delays in building an Iraqi government, stillborn privatization of social security, Katrina, increased Iraqi sectarian violence, and the rise of Iran extremism. Lack of success in Iraq enabled the MSM to pound into the public consciousness an image of Bush as an incompetent failure, an image that combined with Mark Foley’s, did cost Republicans control of Congress.

For the MSM, however, it’s not enough just to break Bush’s power. Measured against the media giants of a generation ago who drove two presidents from office and ended a war, the current crop cannot celebrate until America is out of Iraq.