While there are seven months to go before the initial vote is tallied, there has already been plenty of election sturm und drang, first from the contentious Democratic primaries and then throughout March from the hit-the-ground-running attack dogs of both the Kerry and the Bush camps. [Emphasis added -- Ed]

Whatever is Stranahan talking about? Contentious? This year's Democratic primaries have been the least contentious in my memory, and the Democratic party is more united than I've ever seen it, all on account of Bush, whose sins pale before any intramural disagreements within the party.

It's odd that such a comment, lacking any real historical perspective, should lead off an article which attempts to weigh the current coverage against that of previous campaigns. Stranahan does provide a lot of background, but ultimately fails to provide any kind of answer to her own question.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that sites like The Campaign Desk, Annenberg's FactCheck and Spinsanity, which try to remain as objective as possible and examine the shortcomings of both sides, while very useful to some extent, have become part of the "Gotcha!" culture that permeates politics, and which has lead us to a situation where every politician, pundit and public person is expected to have lead a pure, unblemished and blameless life, an expectation which is, of course, impossible to live up to, human nature being what it is.

"Gotcha" politics pumps up small peccadilloes and personal failing to the level of great moral and ethical failures, which they are not, and blinds us to the fact that the quality of a transgression is its most important aspect. The apotheosis of contemporary "Gotcha" politics was the right-wings attempt to force Bill Clinton from office over his personal failure to keep his sex life neat and tidy.

Pointing out small failures and mistakes is useful, as I said, but it rather assumes that all parties are playing by the same rules, which is most certainly not the case with the Bush administration. Certainly, their advertising and public pronouncements can be (and should be) scrutinized for errors, but making this the only emphasis misses the big picture, which is that while normative political behavior is to bend and stretch the truth as much as possible while still adhering to the primacy of factual reality, the Bush people are practicing a concerted program of disseminating The Big Lie, of asserting, vigourously and aggresively, that up is down and black is white, and against that kind of behavior the watchdog sites are helpless, because they can never step back far enough from the immediacy of the fray to see that they're being played at a much higher and much more serious level.

(For specific examples of the Big Lie in action, keep an eye on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo where he frequently notes instances of Bush's "topsy-turvy world" in action.)