Josh Marshall covers the posterior-covering post-mortem on Norm Coleman's recount loss to Al Franken.
As one GOP operative told The Hill, "They allowed the legal proceedings to define the media environment."
But Josh reminds us that Coleman did define the media environment for the first month.
But for the first month or so after the November election hardly anyone gave Franken any hope of winning. And all the all-knowing editorial commentary was pushing for him to get out. But Coleman's boffo media environment started to buckle as the recount started to show that he'd probably lost. Admittedly, a hard set of facts for a well manicured media environment, such as Coleman's, to overcome.
This is where a comparison to Florida 2000 is instructive: in 2000, the Busheviks created a media environment in which a recount was simply unacceptable. First, they attacked any voter who got confused by the butterfly ballot as too stupid to deserve to have their vote counted. Then they attacked Al Gore as a Sore Loser. Then they attacked any sensible effort to analyze hanging chads as irrational (even though Bush's own Texas law specified how many of the 4 corners had to be broken in order to count as a vote). Then they resorted to brute force to shut down the Miami-Dade recount.
In other words, they did everything possible - in the media, in the courts, and in the streets - to prevent any count of the 175,000 ballots that were rejected by machines. And while they created a recount delay, they screamed that any delay in declaring Bush the winner would create an unacceptable national crisis. And the media hyped the Bushevik narrative morning, noon, and night.
In Minnesota, Norm Coleman could not manufacture a bogus national crisis. Everyone understood a recount would take time, and Coleman's ping-pong arguments in court just made it take longer. And as Josh points out, the actual recount results eclipsed the spin, although it took a lot of progressive blogging to bring the results to the fore.
In 2000, Democrats.com and our heroic allies tried to force Florida to count all the votes, but the netroots were in its infancy and we didn't have Blogs. If only we had succeeded in forcing Florida to count all the votes, the past 8 years would not have been a catastrophe that will take a generation to fix - if we can fix it at all.
