Another Wishful Liberal MSM Meme dies a lonely death:
Mickey Kaus
Remember when the images from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were going to awaken Americans to the need to address yawning inequalities of race and class, etc.? Here's Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, in a recent presentation to the Center for American Progress [pdf]:
>>People also think that America has made progress in terms of race, and people don't like revisiting things when they think that there has been progress. And unfortunately, Katrina did not add much to this dialogue, and certainly the post – we could have a whole symposium on the post-Katrina environment and how that may or may not have worked to actually promote a constructive dialogue in this country on race. But it is certainly true that people very quickly got off any kind of analysis that Katrina was due to race and the patterns of Katrina were due to race.
And when we try to test that, even as recently as a couple of weeks ago, in focus groups, people said – white people said, "Well, hey, it was an African-American mayor. It was a black mayor. It was just incompetence. It was corruption. It had nothing to do with race. A black mayor couldn't get black people out of New Orleans." And so people have really settled back into actually kind of a mean-spirited assessment here. Far from Katrina promoting very much, if anything Katrina is backfiring a little bit.
And you may have heard the NPR story today, which was excellent in the polling data, where people who welcomed once Katrina people keep to their neighborhoods and to their cities now want them to go back, now say, "Well, it's the crime rates. They don't fit in. They don't dress the same. They don't speak the same. We want them to go home now. Enough is enough. We've been generous for five minutes. That's plenty, and get back on your own." [Emph. added]
Hmm. The MSM's Murtha Hype backfires on the Dems. ... The MSM Katrina Hype backfires on the Dems. ... And they say it's wrong to worry about the Brokeback Hype! ...[Don't forget the Exxon and Abramoff hype!--ed. Oh, right. That will save the Dems!] ... 8:19 P.M.
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