Assassination by media, completed

Time chimes in on some of the things that sank John Edwards' presidential bid:

[Edwards] was plagued by a series of missteps that damaged his image as a crusader for the poor. First came a spate of stories when Edwards built a $6 million home on 100 acres outside Chapel Hill in 2005. Then came an embarrassing disclosure that he paid $400 for his carefully coifed haircut.

And as we all know, these frivolous, irrelevant stories were discovered by unknown citizens and passed solely by word of mouth throughout the country, spreading like wildfire; within minutes nearly every person in the US had heard about them from friends, family members, and even helpful strangers.  But just think how much worse it could have been if the media had focused obsessively on them as well, almost to the exclusion of anything of substance about Edwards' campaign!

Time also offers this bit of analysis, with no hint of self-reflection:

[T]oday he is admitting what all the pundits and politicos have been saying for the past month: the Democratic contest is a two-person race, and Edwards is not one of them.

And of course the fact that that's been the near-universal media frame for the past month had nothing to do with it.

Edwards' actual record is sordid enough that I never took his (generally outstanding) campaign rhetoric at face value, and it wouldn't have surprised me at all if he'd thrown it aside, in whole or in part, had he by some miracle been elected.  But I did give him the benefit of the doubt for one reason: it wasn't remotely in his self-interest to say the things he was saying, since they were only going to damage his ability to raise money from corporate backers and make him a primary target for the corporate media.  And sure enough, here we are.

With Edwards and Kucinich gone, even the barely-visible flickers of hope that were out there in this election have been extinguished.  At this point, my main criterion is just which of these power-hungry blackguards will be the least painful to listen to day after day for the next four years.

Comments

[Save the Oocytes]

Don't despair, John! Gravel could still win it.

[John Caruso]

Egads, you're right. The ABM has been so effective in that case that I forgot he was still running, since I've barely heard his name for months now.

[petey]

i understand that gravel recently has had health problems that have put him off the campaign. not that the MSM hadn't already hidden him pretty well. but then i don't know about that national plebiscitary idea of his.

"Edwards' actual record is sordid enough that I never took his (generally outstanding) campaign rhetoric at face value"

me neither, and not just his political record. he was a litigation star before his turn to politics - he was asked at lawyers' conferences to give demonstrations of closing arguments - and, since he was a successful practitioner of the common law, he is going to hell.

[John Caruso]

petey: I'm not clear if you're being tongue-in-cheek about Edwards' lawyering. I haven't researched the cases he handled, but generally speaking I support lawyers who help deserving plaintiffs sue corporations for major amounts of cash (like Stella Liebeck suing McDonald's over their refusal to pay her hospital costs after she was burned by their coffee, say).

[ms_xeno]

Now, now, Mr. C. Everyone knows Liebeck dumped that coffee in her lap on purpose because Americans love to sue and stuff. Hell, you have no idea how many times I've deliberately scalded my naughty bits with near-boiling beverages in hopes of winning truckloads of cash overnight. I just haven't found the right shyster yet, but it's only a matter of time...

[petey]

"I'm not clear if you're being tongue-in-cheek about Edwards' lawyering."

i'm not being tongue-in-cheek at all. he was a masterful lawyer, famous for it before his political career, but having had close exposure to lawyering, i know that the practice of the common law is a moral cesspit, even if it is directed to just goals.