Eric Boehlert’s Salon piece yesterday on “Bush’s Missing Year” — the strange lacunae in our president’s service records — is a must-read if, like me, you continue to wonder why this story has never quite broken out in the mainstream media the way it should. The process by which the American press collectively decides what stories have “legs” and which ones should be buried remains fascinating, bizarre and far more important to our political process than it should be. Journalism schools should be throwing their resources at this! First chronicle it, exhaustively; then teach a new generation of writers and editors of ways to bypass it. On optimistic days I share the Internet idealism that suggests this sort of “gatekeeping” is doomed; but there’s still plenty of cause for pessimism.

The media’s view of the American electoral process seems more and more built around the notion of the “defining moment” — those stop-motion, flash-bulb instants when a candidate’s true self is supposedly revealed, his real personality exposed. Given how much of political campaigns is pre-scripted and post-spun, our hunger for such epiphanies is understandable. Reagan’s smiling “There you go again.” Dukakis in the tank. And now, the Dean Scream.

But do defining moments really give us the key to understanding a candidate? Sometimes the moment the media etches into our consciousness — whether it’s papa Bush supposedly gawking at a supermarket scanner or Al Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet — is simply inaccurate. Sometimes it’s a genuine revelation of a candidate’s inadequacy (like Gerald Ford’s 1976 statement that Poland and Rumania weren’t Soviet-dominated — how did that guy get into the White House, again?). Sometimes it’s a cruel and, in retrospect, unwarranted media pile-on (Ed Muskie’s tears). And sometimes it’s just plain trivial. Now that this process of defining the Defining Moment has become ritualized, instead of being a means of cutting through scripting and spinning, it has become a highly targeted object of the scripting and spinning.

It is, in other words, just as likely to be a part of the bullshit as to be an antidote to the bullshit.

So before the Dean Scream gets cryogenically frozen in the collective memory as the candidate’s defining moment, perhaps we have one last chance to put it in perspective. Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect reports that the room was deafening and you had to scream to be heard. Dave Winer, at Dean’s New Hampshire HQ that night, tells of hearing similar battle-cries from the Dean volunteers there, and suggests that they have been part of the campaign’s “motivational culture.”

Whatever the story, it was a weird, funny moment, and now everyone knows about it, and the only important question is, does it really define the Dean campaign? Those who have maintained that Dean and his supporters are fueled by anger apparently found a potent symbol to support their argument; they don’t seem to care that Dean was actually smiling when he was shouting. But for the rest of us, this defining moment doesn’t define much of anything. It tells us nothing we didn’t already know about Dean and his campaign: The candidate has a close bond with his young supporters. Things got rowdy. Who cares?

If the Scream goes down in the history books as the moment that destroyed Dean’s candidacy, I have only one thing to say: YEEEAAARGH!

MoveOn wants to run the winning ad in its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest during the Super Bowl.
Advertising Age quotes a CBS spokesperson saying that “he didn’t think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices.”

The MoveOn “Child’s Pay” ad is a substantive argument about the deficit, contains no allusions to Nazism and features images far tamer than overgrown men battering one another for possession of a scrap of pigskin. If CBS refuses to run it, MoveOn should mobilize a mass boycott of the network. Hell, we wouldn’t miss much.

Rummy wins the “Foot in Mouth” award (via Metafilter). The previous winners are a riot, too.