We’re just a little over half-way through the big day and the right is already finding scapegoats to explain a Kerry victory. They apparently have settled on an old stand-by.
Henry Farrell, for example, noted that two very high–profile conservative bloggers are blaming — you guessed it — the mainstream media for Bush’s still-undetermined demise. In particular, Farrell highlights Roger L. Simon’s sinister-sounding warnings.
If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently [sic] with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have “plans.”
For most of us who’ve been relying on the mainstream media, this is nothing short of bizarre. The right sees the political press corps as “helping” Kerry despite all that we’ve seen — Bush’s pre-war claims reported without criticism, the media’s disinterest in the criminal investigation of the Bush White House, breathless reports on the Swiftboat lies, reporters on the trail who pay more attention to John Kerry’s comments about Mary Cheney and Teresa Heinz Kerry telling some hack to “shove it” than anything resembling substance…
And yet, this is the new conservative talking point to explain an election they haven’t lost yet. Conservative bloggers, for example, whined incessantly about the media in a New York Times feature this morning.
This is terribly silly and more-than-a-little misplaced.
Henry Farrell did a nice job identifying how conservative bloggers are part of a movement burdened by unshakable denial.
This is surely the blossoming of blogosphere triumphalism into a fully-fledged pathology. A self-sustaining narrative about the perfidy of Big Media is allowing certain bloggers to “explain” why their preferred candidate might be defeated, without any uncomfortable re-examination of prior beliefs that have turned out to be wrong. As a bonus, this provides them with a sort of tinpot revanchist mythology. If Kerry does indeed win, I’ve no doubt that Reynolds, Simon and company would be able to maintain a Regnery Publications-style alternative narrative about how they were robbed, how the invasion of Iraq really would have been a success if it weren’t for those perfidious newspapers’ insistence on ignoring adorable little kitten stories etc etc. But given that warbloggers, like the rest of us, aren’t great shakes at going out there and digging up actual new information, the best they can realistically hope for is to become a distributed version of what the Drudge Report was during the Clinton years, dishing out dirt, conspiracy theories and the odd bit of useful information, but fundamentally parasitic on the mainstream media that they claim to despise.
The part about re-examination rings particularly true. I’ve been thinking about how the right would react to a Kerry victory, wondering if party leaders are even capable of retrospection. What’s left of the GOP moderates (Christie Todd Whitman, the Log Cabin gang, Ann Stone, and maybe four other people nationwide) seem to be secretly hoping for a Bush defeat so centrists can get a shot at reasserting some power of the party’s agenda.
But this is misguided and overly optimistic. A Kerry victory wouldn’t get the GOP thinking about how to recover from a repudiation of a failed presidency; it’d get the party focused on blaming external scapegoats. It just goes to show what Bush has done to his party — deny responsibility, deny reality, and make the sure the buck always stops somewhere else.