Starting with Sarah Palin, the first Tea Party candidate, it seems like Tea Party candidates are generally unintelligent extremely conservative candidates with major skeletons in their closets. The past couple days has made it crystal clear why this is the case. The media is working overtime to paint candidates who represent regular Americans as fringe.
Exhibit A: Deleware Christine O'Donnell is already the media's favorite candidate to mock and ridicule. Granted she hasn't made it too difficult, but not everyone spends every year of their life planning a run for office. This past week we saw an
anonymous article released that tried to make Christine out as a slut. The only evidence to back out the anonymous claims of a wild story, were pictures of Christine in a ladybug suit having a good time. The photos were cropped in such a way as to try to preserve the anonymity of the accuser. The story was so outlandish liberals had to
begrudgingly condemn it.
Exhibit B: Alaska After a reporter from the Achorage CBS affiliate left a voice mail with Joe Miller's spokesperson
he forgot to disconnect the phone line. The rest of the voice mail message was a conversation between reporters planning how they would stage a story of child molestors supporting Joe Miller, and try to create an incident like the Rand Paul stomp fiasco.
You can read the transcript
here.
Journalism is not pushing anonymous stories, and planning how to make candidates look bad. That is what people with a political axe to grind do, not unbiased journalists.
Anyone can be made to look bad whether by overplaying seemingly innocent situations, or digging deep enough. Many candidates do have some comment, situation, or action that they would prefer was not brought up. Sadly politics today is more interested in making someone look bad than debating issues. This fact is even more true when conservative candidates challenging the status quo are involved. We need to be aware of this and careful of what we believe about our own candidates from the media who wants them defeated.
Understanding that people seem to work overtime to make conservative candidates look bad, these candidates and campaigns need to be careful how they respond. It is a mistake to portray yourself as a victim, as Sarah Palin seemed to want to do. Others will point that fact out. It is also a mistake to avoid the media as Rand Paul and Sharon Angle have done throughout this cycle. Instead, engage the media and fight back against the charges (assuming they are false) while standing strong and not trying to play the victim card. This is something Nikki Haley did very well through the brutal primary campaign in her bid for Governor of South Carolina.
On election day, let's disappoint the media and elect all the candidates mentioned in this post as well as the others standing for the constitution and limited government.
