  Even a Badnarik voter like me was distressed at the whitewashing of the post-Democratic convention coverage. As many junkies know (and as many news sources reported up to the convention), presidential candidates often get a "bounce" in the polls after their official nomination, usually around 10 percent or so.
Every poll conducted after the Democratic convention has Kerry with a bounce anywhere between zero and 4 points -- a disaster, it seems, historically. After all, even Michael Dukakis had a convention bounce. But that's not what I read in the papers yesterday and today. The articles almost uniformly crow about Kerry's minor bounce, with almost no mention that it is a woeful underperformance, historically.
USA Today, which actually ran an article reporting "no bounce for Kerry," (their poll had Kerry down a point after the convention) blamed the "intensely partisan" race rather than Kerry and his platform, or his awful convention speech. Imagine if President Bush lost ground after the Republican convention; what would the headlines say then? I rarely point a finger at the "liberal media," but in this case bad news for John Kerry is being reported differently than if it was bad news for George Bush. 
