Well it’s been one of the most tumultuous 3 and a half weeks in politics, ever since the June debate between Biden and Trump. Since that debate:

• The media perception of Biden has degraded from “frail but sharp old man” to “doesn’t always know what’s happening around him”
• The Democratic Party line has gone from “Biden is the nominee, we can’t change him or it will cause chaos” to “Harris is the nominee”
• Every Democrat in congress seemed to be calling for Biden to step down, and
• Biden has stepped down as candidate, endorsing Harris

Some Democrats have (as they have all year) said that this was nothing more than an overblown media circus, that would have never caught fire if the lyin’ press hadn’t been so desperate for clicks that they cooked up a scandal. There’s a strong current among the Stancilite wing of the party to claim that every voter is an automaton who believes nothing except what the media says. So if the media says Biden is old, that’s what they believe. But the media *should* have said Biden was sharp as a tack and steering the ship of state, because then everyone would have believed that.

The idea that “The Media” (capital T capital M) is always against the Democrats is part and parcel of liberal mythmaking. Nevermind that it’s also part and parcel of *conservative* mythmaking, I encountered this liberal mythmaking first-hand in the aftermath of the Howard Dean campaign.

The liberal myth goes something like this: Howard Dean was a threat to the Establishment with powerful grassroots organization and nationwide appeal. But one night when trying to give a triumphant yell, he instead gave a weird-sounding scream. The Media repeated the “Dean Scream” endlessly, making a mockery of him to the voters and torching his campaign. In his stead, the underwelming, flip-flopping John Kerry was sent to lose against George W Bush. If *only* we’d stuck with Dean!

The problem with the “Dean Scream” myth is that it reverses cause and effect: it says that The Media used the Dean Scream to discredit him in the eyes of the voters. Yet looking at the record, the Dean Scream happened as he was trying to gin up his supporters after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucus, in which he vastly underperformed expectations and got just 18% of the vote, less than half of front-runner John Kerry and a very distant third behind the ascendant John Edwards.

Taken in context, The Media didn’t discredit Dean, the voters had already turned their backs on him. Dean was supposed to be a front-runner going into the caucus but his very poor showing put paid to that idea hours before his historic scream.

Kerry and Edwards would go on to be presidential and vice presidential nominees for that year.

Yet the idea that the Media creates perception (and therefore reality) still has power among the twitterati. When Biden was dealing with the fallout of the debate, many liberal commentators tore into The Media, claiming that if anyone was suffering from dementia it was rambly, half-awake Donald Trump. And since Biden has now dropped out, liberal commentators are trying to will a “Trump has dementia” angle into existence.

This seems like an insane take to me because *we all saw the debate*. No matter how much Trump lied and deflected, he said real words and you could understand them, Biden sounded like he was barely awake! The line of the night was Trump’s terrifyingly accurate quip of “I don’t know what he just said, and I don’t think he does either.”

And we can all see that Trump has done rally after rally after rally while Biden really *hasn’t*, and team Biden did everything in their power to prevent even a single off-script moment from ever being seen. All the while reports are coming in from allies all across congress and *across the Atlantic* that Biden hasn’t been all there for a really long time, and is confusing people and places left and right.

Meanwhile the curious voter can tune into any one of the many rallies that Trump holds, or just watch Fox News and see a man doing twice as many rallies, interviews and the like than Biden. As well as doing infinitely many more unscipted spots since Biden didn’t seem to do any.

Saying Trump is too old will certainly resonate, half the country already thought he was while 80% of the country thought Biden was. But trying to tar Trump with the same brush Biden got will not work I think because the reality doesn’t look like what the Democrats want out of a narrative. Like the Dean Scream myth, Democrats have taken away the idea that The Media creates reality, and if they can just *will* a narrative into existence, they can say anything about their opponents that their opponents say about them. I don’t think that works any more than Republicans trying to call Democrats election deniers works, because people have eyes.

At the end of the day The Media can certainly amplify stories and let narratives run away with things, but the idea that they can create something out of nothing is a myth. And Democrats trying to say *the media needs to be saying this” ie “Trump has dementia, Trump can’t speak straight,” trying to demand The Media simply reverse the story and put all of Biden’s flaws on Trump, well that isn’t going to work. They’d do a lot better hammering on things which are real instead of trying to create something out of nothing.

That may have been part of the problem for Democrats these past 3 weeks. While they were doing damage control for Biden, the most common rejoinder I saw was “Trump is just as old and just as senile!” The first is false, but at least close to true, Trump is very old. The second is an outright lie, 50 million people saw the debate, and you can’t lie to their face like that.

If Democrats lose, I think The Debate will enter the hall of myths alongside the Dean Scream, as a moment when The Media sharpened their knives and took out the strongest Democratic candidate available because (laughably) they were in the tank for Republican. And I think myths like that will make the party far weaker than it would otherwise be.