Manufactured Outrage

Daniel Henninger has a good piece at OpinionJournal.com regarding the media and Dem outrage at everything Bush/Cheney administration does, and what may be the strategy at work here:

Some say Dick Cheney is toast. He's too hot to handle, throw him over the side if he won't drop himself into the waves. Don't look now, but that isn't water surrounding the Bush ship of state. It's gasoline. The issue titled "Dick Cheney" is just one of many embers.

Have you ever noticed how on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush National Guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

There was a time when what's been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn't bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event--large, small, in between--plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this "is part of the secretive nature of this administration."

Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited the past five years: the "stolen" 2000 election, Halliburton, "Fahrenheit 9/11," Cheney lives in an "undisclosed location," Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantanamo, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons, Rumsfeld, Cheney's "secret" energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying Social Security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?

Admittedly it's a partial list. This week alone wasn't half over before it had already dumped onto the public first the Cheney shooting scandal and then that George Bush made Katrina worse. This morning's papers may have more bad news.

If it all seems more than a little tiresome, if you wish it would all just go away, well, maybe that's the point--their point. Induce swing voters to seek respite from the Bush experience.

Henninger points out that even when the polls don't support the Dems/media outcry, they persist. Here's a possible reason why:

The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a "constitutional crisis" even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone's phone "on a regular basis" to catch terrorists.

Parties don't sail against the polling winds. Why this time? Because come November, the "wiretaps" will sit in many voters' minds not as a debate over Article II but as part of what feels to them like endless "bad news." The press's supersizing of the Cheney shooting may look like excess. So what? No matter how voters feel on any one issue--terror, the courts, values--the Democrats, event after event, are building the feeling that the Bush-Cheney presidency and GOP Congress have somehow been 40 miles of bad road.

Can it work? Absent a 21st-century political vision, I think Democratic candidates will always be drawing to an inside straight. Creating a negative aura is easier than contending on discrete issues such as taxes. Yes, substance and ideas count in politics, but in many parts of American culture these days feelings and stereotypes are money. Why not make the public just want to throw in the towel on the Republican "experience"?

The Bush and GOP team will have to continue an aggressive defense lest they be overwhelmed by the negativity pouring out of the left.