Hillary, Johnny Mac and Mo

"Let me concede that Rove is a detail-minded, relentless, and methodical political operator with unusual skill at networking and organization-building. He is also, clearly, a strategic and historical thinker...

"But with the conservative edifice groaning and shifting, there are at least some grounds for skepticism about the architect's brilliance. While Rove boasts an impressive winning streak, the largest part of his success is arguably due to luck and circumstances beyond his control. By rights, Bush should have lost the presidency in 2000. He got fewer popular votes than Al Gore, and would have had fewer in the Electoral College but for poor ballot design in Florida . . .

"My skeptic's reaction is that we've not yet had a true test of Roveism--one that tells us whether the theory can deliver for Republicans in less propitious circumstances and without a blundering Democratic opponent. But on Nov. 7, we are finally going to have that test. External conditions for Republicans--the war in Iraq, anemic job creation and middle-class wage growth, high gas prices, the Abramoff lobbying scandal, the Foley page scandal--are terrible. And because it's a midterm, there is no single Democratic opponent whom Rove can define as a flip-flopping traitor."

Tom Friedman found himself in the spotlight when he compared the surge of violence in Iraq to the Viet Cong's Tet offensive, and President Bush acknowledged to George Stephanopoulos that there might be something to that. TigerHawk strongly disagrees:

"At the time the media perceived and promoted the Tet offensive as a great victory for the enemy. In an age when the network anchors deployed truly awesome power, Walter Cronkite destroyed Lyndon Johnson's chances for re-election when he editorialized that we were 'mired in stalemate.' President Johnson declared 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America,' and withdrew from the 1968 presidential campaign.

"Tet, however, was not a military disaster for the United States. Quite to the contrary, history has revealed that the Tet offensive was in fact a crushing defeat for the Viet Cong, and effectively required that the Communists conquer the South by invasion from the North, rather than by civil insurgency. The Viet Cong were only able to turn a military disaster into strategic victory by persuading the American media that the United States was mired in stalement. With the domestic political support for the war fading fast, the United States decided to withdraw from Indochina, even though it would take Nixon and Kissinger another four years to accomplish it."

In fairness, Friedman acknowledged that very point: "Although the Vietcong and Hanoi were badly mauled during Tet, they delivered, through the media, such a psychological blow to U.S. hopes of "winning" in Vietnam that Tet is widely credited with eroding support for President Johnson and driving him to withdraw as a candidate for re-election."

At Power Line, Scott Johnson is still worked up over Tet:

"If journalism were a profession, Peter Braestrup's 1977 book Big Story would be required reading in every journalism school. Braestrup's long subtitle is a little dry: 'How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington.' But his analysis was memorable. Braestrup showed that the press blew the story of the Tet offensive, portraying a major American battlefield victory as a disaster.

"In the introduction to the 1994 edition of his book, Braestrup characterized the coverage as 'an unusual media malfunction,' one 'on a scale that helped shaped Tet's repercussions in Washington and the administration's response.' Paul Weaver wrote in his Commentary review of Big Story: 'A politicized press speaking the language of news is an instrument of propaganda, and such an institution does not foster democracy, but erodes it.' It is an observation that bears on the media's treatment of President Bush's comment itself."

I would suggest that the sectarian carnage in Iraq is so bad right now that it doesn't require a "politicized press" for people to realize the magnitude of the mess.

Dick Polman has a brilliant insight here (which happens to match something I wrote the other day):