New Media Meme: White House Is "Confident" It Will Win Iraq Fight Against Dems
August 30, 2007 -- 2:35 PM EST // //

As you probably remember, one of the more unsightly aspects of the press' performance during the 2006 midterm elections was its constant assertion, no matter what the polls said, that the GOP was "confident" and "gleeful" and "on the offensive" against the Dems. A bunch of us stamped our feet for weeks about this, and the big news orgs finally started telling the story right, helping lead to the rout of the Republicans.

Now this is starting to happen again. And this time, the new media meme has it that the White House is "confident" that it's going to "win" the coming showdown with the Dem Congress on Iraq.

Check out the headline and lede on this New York Times piece today:

White House Is Gaining Confidence It Can Win Fight in Congress Over Iraq Policy

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — The White House is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq, a significant turnabout from two months ago, when a string of Republican defections had administration officials worried that President Bush’s troop buildup was in serious danger on Capitol Hill.

Guess how many administration officials are quoted saying that the White House is "confident" that it can "win" the Iraq fight? Exactly none. One former official says he detects a "tonal shift" but says that it could be "ephemeral." A second official says -- anonymously -- that there's a "sense the dynamic has changed," but concedes the fight is up in the air. Only one former official says anything close to this, noting that people think the surge will continue into the spring -- hardly a sign of sweeping confidence in long-term victory. Maybe the White House is confident about this fight, but you wouldn't know it from the quotes in this piece.

Meanwhile, pundit Charlie Cook is quoted saying the momentum is "probably" with the White House right now. This echoes other punditry we're starting to hear. But really, this notion of "momentum" is all too often a Beltway-concocted illusion, the result of a hall-of-mirrors effect where one pundit repeats it after hearing it from another pundit, who heard it from another pundit, and so on. Republican lawmakers on recess are getting pummeled by constituents demanding an end to the war -- constituents who are outside the Beltway and don't particularly care who Charlie Cook claims has "momentum." Who's to know which way the momentum is really going?

This is also an emerging narrative at other big news orgs. Yesterday The Washington Post published a story saying that the White House believes that the Dem Congress will be reluctant to confront the White House and demand a drawdown of troops after General Petraeus testifies about progress in Iraq. The basis for this claim? A single anonymous source. Incredibly, no Dem was allowed to rebut this.

Look, again, maybe the White House is confident that it will win this fight. After all, Dems are a long way from a veto-proof majority. Nonetheless, this assertion just isn't being backed up by reporting in the papers that are telling us that it is so. Indeed, it seems more likely that this emerging storyline is based on nothing more than an editorial decision to assert that it's the case. Exactly the way it happened in 2006 -- until the big news orgs finally decided to get the story right.

Update: Apologies for all the tech difficulties today...

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