Tom Edsall pens a gloomy piece about the impact of the war on the Democrats. Hardcore Democratic donors – Streisand et al – are demoralized by the party leadership’s final acquiescence to the Bush administration. So funding is down; and the anti-Bush base may not show up in November. So far, very few Dems have pandered to this base mercilessly: Gore and Kennedy are the obvious exceptions to the rule. The broader implication is an interesting one: the more successful Bush is as a war president, the more generally popular he will be, but the more reviled he will become among the hard-core Dems. So the Dems lose money and votes. I’m not predicting anything. I still think this Congressional election is way too close to call. But the dynamics Edsall illustrates would have me very depressed for the medium term if I were a Dem.
ROMENESKO’S BLINDERS: A reader points out:
[Romenesko’s] boycott of “conservative” sites is so complete that it causes him to miss stories he’d otherwise be all over. Like The Weekly Standard yanking a small story about what exactly happened at a Buzzcocks concert, a story that turned out to be made up, as far as anyone can tell. Wednesday’s Opinionjournal, having linked to the story the day before, noted the apparent retraction. No sign on media”news” though.
To be fair to Romenesko, “boycott” strikes me as too strong a word. He links occasionally to the Journal and has my site up as one of many media links. It’s just that he has blind spots and tends to believe that non-liberal journalists aren’t real ones. And he loves the new hyper-lib Times.
The Dish 