Reply #9: Yeah, I picked Dean around last February or so [View All]

[ProfessorPlum]

for exactly the same reasons you mention.

And he certainly has had his up and downs with the media - getting pretty negative coverage at first, then getting a lot of mostly positive coverage, and then getting lots of negative coverage.

In the end, though, he got lots of coverage, and that can only have helped his chances of being selected by voters.

You and I both saw something in him that the vast majority of our fellow Democrats didn't see, or didn't trust, or were uncomfortable with, for whatever reason, and I just don't think the lens of the media has as much power to distort that perception as perhaps some people think it has.

If the media were so powerful, then Gore would not only have not won the election in 2000, he would have probably been run out of the country by the members of his own party for being such a pathological liar.

The ups and downs of Dean's media coverage may have been unfair (both in a positive and a negative way - certainly from the way people have been voting his appeal during the days when he was getting very positive coverage was not very widespread, just very deep and committed from the people he had reached) - but I think quite a lot of it is reflective of the mood of the voters, and therefore reactionary, and not causitive, of voters' opinions.

But anyway, it is a very sad day for me. I am rather deeply surprised, dismayed, and saddened that more of the people in my party didn't perceive what is so appealing about the guy.