Anyone here catch that annoying segment on CNN last night about supposed divisions in the Democratic party? You couldn't have gone to central casting for a better set of hackneyed stereotypes. From the "rural South," they had one guy who was a Zell Miller wannabe; from the "urban North," they had a latte-drinking investment banker. The Southerner was tubby and baby-faced, of course, while the Northerner was skinny and intellectual-looking.
What really got my goat, though, was that CNN proceeded to extrapolate, from extensive interviews with these two lone people, a grand theory of an ostensibly insurmountable rift between the Bush-voting Dems of the South and the liberal Dems of the North. Particularly disingenuous was their raising of the issue of "Guns, God, and Gays:" after showing short, completely context-free clips of Dean, Kerry and others making firebrand pro-gay statements, they cut back to the Southerner, who laments that the focuse of the candidates is far too much on these issues, when there are other issues out there.
Uh, hello?!? has this guy paid any attention to the campaign at all? If so, he would be surprised to see that the Dem candidates have, in fact, been focusing overwhelmingly on bread-and-butter issues: Bush's borrow-and-spend recklessness, jobs, health care, blah blah blah. Yet to look at this clip on CNN, you would think that Dean et al did nothing all day except wave pink flags from the hilltop!
This is not to take away from the brave and principled stances that Dean, Kerry and others have made on issues close to women and gays and lesbians. However, CNN's lazy coverage gives us a cartoonish, misleading view of a party divided along irreconcilable lines. This despite the fact that for a field consisting of eight candidates, there is remarkable continuity across the board between the candidates: despite attitudes about the war, just about all of them want to see something done about health care, about Bush's unfair tax cuts, about a whole host of meat-and-potatoes issues.
But CNN isn't interested in all that. Let the Goring of [insert Dem here] begin!