stealing her thunder

In my loose postmortem of campaign ‘08, I wrote that the MSM was a handmaiden to Obama’s “victory.”

Courtesy of the WaPo, here’s how it went down [e.a.]:

He did not win Indiana, but he got the next-best thing. A resounding victory in North Carolina dominated the news all night while the media waited for delayed returns to roll in from Gary, Ind. Obama’s victory speech was televised. Clinton waited, and waited. By the time her narrow Hoosier State win was declared, any momentum she gained had disappeared.

Time after time after time, Obama won on television, every single one of his humiliating defeats whitewashed by the media’s Obama Love (and Clinton hatred).

Michael Dukakis recently had some advice for the Dems about that. He wants a massive on-the-ground operation for the Democrats in the fall [e.a.]:

So I want to see [someone] in every single one of the 200,000 precincts in the United States. If we do that, we’re going to win those people over. If we think we’re going to win it on television, then we’re kidding ourselves.

Can you win an election just on television [with the complicity of the media]? That is just one of the many questions this campaign has raised. One day perhaps we’ll find out.