WaPo did its best
today to innoculate the public against any outrage at Republican attempts to steal the election. The thrust was that Democrats are doing it too -- they even registered Mary Poppins! -- and there'll always be a little jostling in any election. Boys will be boys.
As with the Wall Street Journal, I'd generally learned to separate the news gathering/reporting part of the Post from its editorial page. Now I'm going to have to reevaluate. This story was a real stinker, obviously planned and placed "in a conference call with reporters" by the Bush campaign.
My guess is that the Bush campaign knows it can play on the establishment media's need to maintain the pretense that elections here are fair and that our leaders are legitimate. Generally, the Kerry camp did o.k. with what it was handed on this story, but the story gave Chimpco exactly what it wanted.
Sadly, I haven't seen the Kerry campaign get the very real instances of obvious Republican voter intimidation and disenfranchisement into the national media. It's unclear if this is a strategy on Kerry's part or if the Kerry camp is just too busy with other things. Josh Marshall has noted that no political reporter has asked the Bush campaign when it knew that New England Republican operative Jim Tobin was implicated in the New Hampshire phone jamming scheme and why the Bush Campaign kept him in place for so long after it became obvious that he was.
One hopes the Kerry media pros can at least get someone in the press to ask Busco those two questions. I can't see any political downside. Can you?