In the days and few weeks immediately following the election last year, the
media pronounced gloom and doom for the Democratic Party and its constituents,
such as gay rights advocates. Journalists and media outlets of the left and the
right, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Newsweek,
among most others, announced that the Democrats were down and out, and that the
evangelical Christians and the Republicans were the rising power. They divided
the country into red states and blue states, and offered up glossy maps to show
that most states were red and therefore Republican strongholds.
The New York Times, in a special news analysis, announced that “President Bush’s
re-election
is the clearest confirmation yet that America is a center-right
country.” Newsweek was even bolder, reporting not only that the “GOP may be the
majority party for the foreseeable future,” but that “red-state Democrats are a
diminishing breed.” The media even succeeded in encouraging the venerable
Democratic strategist James Carville to say, in an interview only forty-eight
hours after the election, “We are an opposition party and not a particularly