Krauthammer

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column today headlined "'Moral Values' Myth" in which he makes an important point about post-election conventional wisdom.  Excerpt from Krauthammer:

In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony in the House, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained the USA Today headline: "ANGRY WHITE MEN: Their votes turn the tide for GOP."

Overnight, the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election there were 56 mentions of angry white men in the media, according to LexisNexis. In the next seven months there were more than 1,400.

At the time, I looked into this story line -- and found not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory. And, even better, a way to assuage their moral vanity: You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind.

I think the local MSM are trying to adopt a story line about John Thune defeating Senator Daschle by saying Daschle "became the subject of unprecedented attacks" and that the race was "the ugliest race of the state's modern political era."  This kind of hyperbole becomes the conventional wisdom if it's not aggressively countered by the facts.  The fact is that Daschle's record and hubris finally caught up with him, or as DVT likes to say, the chickens came home to roost.