Rick Perry and How the Press Loves to Treat GOP Campaign Losers Like Winners
I’ve been bewildered by this for a long time: just why do GOP failures and losers become media celebrities and stay that way? I think part of it is because the media isn’t interested in real news or political discussion, instead it’s all about the ratings. So any grenade thrower from the right will do as long as they bring some controversy, false or not, and the more bizarre the better.
Apparently none of that matters when the press coalesces around a preferred narrative: Perry is hot and perfectly positioned for 2016. (He won the week!)
Perry’s soft press shouldn’t surprise close observers of the Beltway press corps. It’s part of a larger media double standard where Republican campaign trail losers now routinely get treated like winners. (Think: John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney). The trend also extends to Republican policy failures, like the discredited architects of the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, who have been welcomed back onto the airwaves to pontificate about Iraq, despite the fact they got almost everything wrong about the invasion eleven years ago.
And no, the same courtesy is not extended to Democrats. John Kerry did not camp out on the Sunday talk shows after losing to President Bush in 2004 and become a sort of permanent, television White House critic, the way McCain did after getting trounced by Obama in 2008.
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