What Happened To The Democratic Negativity (Part II)?

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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If Dean somehow surges again, get ready for more negativity. This is a joke, and clever commentators ought to pick up on it.

In other words, the negativity was pointed at Dean, since he was winning, and he responded with negativity. Now, he's not on top, and miraculously the negativity is gone. Since when does the obvious become compelling news? Big Media wants this to be about Dean spinning all the negativity, Kerry being a positive nice guy, and everyone taking notice now. That's not what really happened, at least in reality and not image.

The absence of Democrats speaking out against Big Media's portrayal of Dean (not the Internet, or Drudge, but mainstream media television and newspapers)...

...has been noted by independents everywhere. Apparently, the Democrats don't need to rally around their own, or defend reality, when image and the "politics of personal destruction" is underway, and not by other politicians, but by mainstream media coverage and misreporting.

What I'd like to emphasize is that a real party who really cared about politics in America would band together, despite self-interest of the individual players, and loudly proclaim that this "assassination" coverage is unacceptable and will be identified as such in public at every turn.

This isn't altruistic in its face. It works for the self-interest of all the candidates. If Kerry needs the mainstream media to assassinate Dean's character to win, he doesn't deserve to win. But if he pulls out the nomination, after saying nothing in defense of Dean (in terms of clearly unfair media coverage), and then suddenly faces it himself, and expects people to rally behind him because of it, he can forget it.

Hypocrisy doesn't sell.