Something is missing here

In his recent column, pundit Frank Rich argues that Sarah Palin has a better shot at the presidency in 2012 than other pundits and political opponents give her credit for. He makes some good points (she does seem to connect with the resentment of the anti-elitist Repubs) but then he says this: “The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him.”
This is a tad … ingenuous.
As The Daily Howler website has chronicled over the years (here’s one example), Bush’s success wasn’t because his charisma or his Simple Texas Farmer image or his Rugged Jet Jockey Image won over the public or because people identified with him as a simple regular-guy alternative to Al Gore, Arrogant Intellectual Elitist. A large part of it was because the press liked him better.
The press hated Gore. They cheerfully embraced or sometimes made up stories about how Gore claimed he created the Internet, that he was the model for Love Story‘s protagonist and that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste site (what he said was that a)in Congress he took the lead in promoting the Internet; b)a local paper had quoted Segal as saying the Gores were models for the leads in Love Story [and Segal later confirmed that while the paper had exaggerated Gore’s influence on the book, Al Gore was indeed one of several real-world models for Oliver]; c)that Love Canal kicked off the investigation into toxic sites. All accurate statements) and kept quoting them long after they’d been debunked.
When Gore and Bush had their debates, multiple analysts asserted that sure, Gore technically won the debate—but since everyone thought Bush would do much worse than he did, he was the real winner (one Howler entry shows how public perception of the debate changed to favor Bush after several days of this).
Some pundits and reporters admitted that they didn’t like Gore: He was too smart, like a high-school brainiac, where Bush was like the cool jock who they all wanted to hang with (I am not making that up).
Rich’s fellow NYT pundit Maureen Dowd wrote a column this year grumbling that if Gore had only been more passionate about the environment, wow, maybe he’d have won! At the time, she grumbled that his environmental blather about global warming put her to sleep (a horrifying number of national pundits have a long history of discussing how boring they find government policy as if that proves it unworthy of interest).
Dowd also admitted in an interview that Bush made as many inaccurate statements as Gore supposedly made, and about more substantial policy matters, but it was more entertaining to mock Gore’s gaffs (see what I mean about finding policy boring?).
None of which proves that Palin couldn’t win; two years before the election, that’s anybody’s guess (pundits’ fondness for making predictions this far ahead is another thing that annoys me). But using Bush as evidence that such long shots just well, happen and not acknowledging the press role is just CYA bullshit.