Your mainstream media at work

From Yahoo! News I found this article by David Alexander: Democrat split on Iraq may hurt '08 chances: analysts

Alexander's analysts (as described in the article)?

• Ethan Siegal, an analyst for The Washington Exchange, which monitors Congress for institutional investors.
• Matthew Woessner, a political expert at Pennsylvania State University
• Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, the head of centrist Democratic Leadership Council

Only Woessner's corporatist bias isn't immediately evident from the description, but his quotes give him away immediately:

It will be the Democratic left, which is probably immune to any news of success in Iraq, against the middle-of-the-road America...A nightmare scenario for any party is when the pressure, the sum total of the pressures from their constituency groups, are out of step with mainstream America. That's a prescription for electoral disaster.

Woessner apparently is immune to any news of polls about Iraq, including the 2006 election, which indicate huge unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

Not to be outdone, Siegal chimes in:

"If the Democrats want to keep control of the House in the 2008 elections, they can't force those members to take certain Iraq votes, he said.

Democratic divisions may grow after Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, reports to Congress in September on the results of President George W. Bush's policy of building up troops as a way to stabilize Iraq.

Even a positive report is unlikely to sway the anti-war liberal Democrats, but it will make it difficult for centrist Democrats from more conservative districts to support pulling out troops, the analysts said.

Democrats who had hesitated to vote for timetables and various withdrawal schemes "are going to be even more hesitant now," Siegal said.

And then there's Ford of the DLC:

Some liberals are so confident about Democratic prospects that they contend the centrism that vaulted Democrats to victory in the 1990s no longer matters.

It was Ross Perot, not Clinton's "centrism" (read corporate bias) which "vaulted" him to victory with 43% of the popular vote in 1992 and 49% in 1996, meanwhile losing control of Congress and numerous governorships and state legislatures, much of which wasn't recovered at all until the Dems turned ever so slightly "left" (read sort-of opposed the stupidest war ever) in 2006. A few more "successes" like that and the Dumbos will be ready for burial.

Which wouldn't be entirely a bad thing.

But I digress. This Reuters "news" article doesn't even pretend to be objective--it is simply a corporate media pressure piece to keep the Republocrats in line. Alexander could have, for instance, talked to analyst Glenn Greenwald, whose much more thorough and logical analysis of why Democrats are unpopular can be found here.
Greenwald concludes:

With a President and a Republican Party this deeply unpopular, the only thing the Democrats could really do to harm themselves is to minimize the distinctions between them and Bush, and fail to take a strong stand against the administration. With very rare exception, that is exactly what they have been doing, and that is why they are held in such low esteem. That, of course, has been the predominant critique of Beltway Democratic insiders for quite some time, but this polling data proves this view rather conclusively.