What Happened To The Democratic Negativity (Part III)?

Yesterday, I was hanging out over at Kevin Drum's place (blog). I had some on-the-fly reactions to one of his posts ("The New New Conventional Wisdom"), discussing the media wonderment that Democrats are suddenly such positive creatures.

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Very short version: If you can't defend your own, even while competing against them, against unfair and distorted treatment from the media, which could happen to any of the candidates, then the media gets a pass for it, and when it gets turned against you, you deserve what you get, no matter how much you complain, because you gave the pass earlier saying it was alright, even though you clearly knew what was going on and seemed to have considered it wrong.

Just like the resolution in Iraq in some ways.

You can't have it both ways. The Democrats could have strengthened themselves as a party, and made a surge against negative reporting against them in general (and media bias), by uniting against negative coverage of them as a whole, and at least specifically in this case with Dean, which is the most egregious case of it so far.

They didn't. The Democrats aren't concerned with media bias - at least not today. Yet, they'll make it a big issue later, and I'll be reminding everyone who didn't mind, looked away, and in fact took advantage of, media bias just a months earlier.

Media bias sucks no matter who it benefits. We really need to move away from the corporate slush fund dominated two-party system.