Reporting from Yearly Kos 2007: Foley, Macaca, and How the Democrats Almost Lost

by Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium: Thu., Aug 2, 2007
Filed under: Media Consortium: journalism project

It’s at this point conventional wisdom that the Democrats won in 2006 because their stance on the issues of the day were the popular ones: They wanted to stamp out corruption. They ran against the war. They trumpeted minimum wage and health care. They were swept to victory. Which is to say, it’s easy to forget this picture:

Remember that, for every date on the graph, the war was, as it is now, deeply unpopular with the public. The country was suspicious of Republican policies as well as their ethical mores. And yet the spread continued to narrow all the way until October 2006. That’s when the Foley scandal erupted.

Most people learned what they know about Mark Foley from ABC news, but ABC news learned what they knew about Mark Foley from a series of emails posted to an anonymous blog called Stop Sex Predators–a fly-by-night website run by an activist named Lane Hudson. Hudson, who’s sitting on a panel discussing individual activism at YearlyKos, had heard first hand accounts from pages who knew what Foley had done, and set up the blog after his efforts to push the story directly into the mainstream media had failed. The rest… well, you know the rest.

Hudson wasn’t alone, though. Today, the Democrats hold the Senate by literally the slimmest of margins but one year ago it was fairly widely believed that the GOP would retain control of at least that chamber of Congress. A lot changed leading up to November, but it wasn’t until the days after the election that the Democrats realized they’d taken the whole prize. For all intents and purposes, that’s because George Allen, once considered the future of the Republican party, did this:

His nosedive didn’t come from nowhere. It happened because George Allen, in now-famous confrontations with two activists–S.R. Siddharth and Mike Stark–revealed himself to be both a racist and a thug. The mainstream media picked up the stories, and when perceptions changed, so did Jim Webb’s campaign, which ultimately won the slimmest of victories.

This was all, it seems, equal parts serendipity and shrewd organizing. But it’s also a sobering reminder of a couple realities. First, it’s evidence that elections don’t necessarily hinge on the popularity of the ruling party or their defining policies. But that fact emerges itself from a truly sorry media dynamic. One questioner–a reporter from The Hill, a daily Washington, D.C. political newspaper–was dubious of the idea the mainstream media dropped the ball on the campaign trail. He asked incredulously, “what’s a reporter supposed to do, ask a sitting senator if he’s ever used a racial slur?” To this, the panelists and the audience, surprised at the question, answered simply, “yes.”