digamma.net - notes

Matt Yglesias coins a term that Democrats need to remember in primary season:

This “immunization fallacy” needs to be combatted in all its manifestations. People thought after the 2000 election that it wouldn’t be possible to demonize Tom Daschle, the soft-spoken veteran moderate Senator from very red South Dakota, but it was. People thought during the 2004 primary that it wouldn’t be possible to demonize John Kerry, the war hero, as weak on national security (Kerry himself repeatedly asserted this), but it was. It’s not impossible to demonize anyone, especially when the accuracy of your charges is entirely unrelated to your willingness to make them or to the media’s willingness to cover them in a damaging manner. Reid will be subject to a demonization campaign. If Jeb Bush wins the Democratic nomination in 2008, he will be subject to a demonization campaign. The question is what are you going to do about it?

If I may look backward for a moment, there is a lesson here for any Democrats planning to take a time machine back to January of 2004. Kerry, with his purple hearts, may have looked like a more “immune” candidate. But who looked like a candidate who would take the smear machine head-on and smear back in a winning way?

I still think it was Howard Dean.