Is Mitt Romney the next Al Gore?

The recent feeding frenzy over Mitt Romney's exaggerations is an example of everything that's wrong with the way the media covers politics in general and political dishonesty in particular. It is driven by perceptions of personality and character (the feeling among journalists that Romney is a phony) and has nothing to do with public policy.

Indeed, it's almost a perfect test of hypocrisy for liberals who denounced the media's obsession with Al Gore's penchant for exaggeration (which was, to be sure, far more pervasive and misleading). So why have so few of them spoken up?

Ezra Klein, to his credit, says what needs to be said:

I don't really feel like courting a "wanker of the day" award, but Romney's statement that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. when, really, he just knew -- or thought he knew -- that his father was marching with Martin Luther King Jr., just isn't a big deal. More to the point, it's not the sort of media feeding frenzy that should be validated, even when it's against a figure as odious as Romney. This is exactly the sort of crap the press pulled on Gore, exactly the sort of thing they routinely haul out against politicians they want to destroy. Sometimes, the leader in their gunsight is a good man, and sometimes he is not. But the press corps' ability to inflate every misstatement or rhetorical overstep in the final months of a year-long campaign into a Question of Character seems like a power we don't necessarily want to bless them with. Romney's sins are legion, his panders clear, his political positions a mixture of the opportunistic and the idiotic. Attack him on that. Not a line about something he thought his father did.

Who else? Anyone?

Comments

[Letuce]

"Indeed, it's almost a perfect test of hypocrisy for liberals who denounced the media's obsession with Al Gore's penchant for exaggeration (which was, to be sure, far more pervasive and misleading). So why have so few of them spoken up?"

You write that bullsh*t and you expect anyone to believe it?

You're a real piece of....