Back in 2008, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose talked about Barack Obama, and Brokaw admitted that he didn’t know much about Obama. Few would deny that the media was willfully blind to Obama and gave him a relatively free pass during the campaign. Not only did the MSM not want to know who he was, it had created its own narrative and was going to ignore almost anything that contradicted it. Now, see the results: a president who is nothing like the image of him that was marketed, and a painful price for buying what was being sold.
The media and the left have largely ignored the Tea Party as well. They decided what the Tea Party was before taking the time to understand it, and they’ve mostly avoided adjusting to reality. Even as the Tea Party has gained ground and signaled major defeat for the left this November, many on the left side still choose to ignore who the Tea Party is, instead opting to believe in a false narrative that makes the Tea Party out to be a fringe, extremist group. Their denial will cost them politically.
Howard Kurtz picked up on picked up on the mistake that the media has made of blaming voters for the tide that is about to sweep away Democrats. He notices inconsistency from the media, who praised voters for supporting Obama, but is now criticizing the electorate for not appreciating the president. He suggests that the campaign coverage of Obama was the media’s biggest mistake:
The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.
The Democrats are not only facing disappointment due at least partly to those expectations, but they are facing real opposition from the Tea Party. Peggy Noonan wrote today that the Tea Party is saving Republicans. I think a better way of saying that is that the Tea Party opposition will benefit Republicans in this election cycle, but I caution against saying that the movement saved the GOP, since the Tea Party has little allegiance with the Republican party and has shown it will challenge Republicans in the primaries.
Hugh Hewitt wrote a column expressing the need for Republicans to act quickly on the priorities of voters who will bring change this election. Republicans cannot take time to celebrate regaining power, and they cannot go back to doing what they did before, otherwise Tea Parties will be right there to provide primary challengers in the next election cycle.
This election may be about Obama’s agenda, but that doesn’t mean that once it is over that the Tea Parties will disappear. Both parties should take notice. Many Republicans already have. What will it take for the media and the left to accept what they are dealing with, and address it? Obama’s disastrous performance and obvious contradiction to what the media promised hasn’t worked. Would a landslide defeat be enough?
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