Clinton and Wallace: Could I have been wrong?

I still don't think I was, but below is the case that it might be possible. Maybe.

Recap: At the beginning of the week I predicted that the ripples from last weekend's Clinton-Wallace smackdown wouldn't last very long. It might have been a teachable moment for Clinton himself, I figured, and perhaps the consequences of that might be a little more far-reaching, But otherwise, I figured it was just one more ephemeral blip on the radar screen of the partisanship wars, notable because of the oddity of one of Our Guys actually standing up for the truth but otherwise of little lasting consequence.

McJoan at DailyKOS points to the latest E.J. Dionne column as evidence that it might be something more, closer to a Shot Heard Round the World that might finally mobilize the Dems to take back control of the conversation. It's certainly a good piece by Dionne, and McJoan plays it for all it's worth. And similar takes are turning up along the progressive blogger/liberal pundit axis.

But I'd be more convinced if McJoan didn't seem to have a habit of confusing likely outcomes with outcomes she'd dearly love to see (and I can't fault her much for that), if there was more than one data point to this trend, and if that data point were located outside the Beltway.

The corporate media has largely treated the story as a content-free schoolyard shoving match, more interesting for its short-term ratings power than for its potential to change the conventional wisdom on a major story. The two men could have been arguing about digital cable versus satellite for all the main news outlets have seemed to care.

The right-wing media--O'Reilly and Limbaugh and the rest--have continued to milk the story simply because of their delight in keeping the "Clinton was angry"/"Clinton lost it" spin going another few days. Note how many of them race to compare Clinton with Howard Dean, the linkage offered as putative proof that Democrats--all Democrats, apparently; this fish screams from the head down--are hysterical, out-of-control screamers.

If someone could find me a reliable survey of 600 people in Colorado who said, "My gosh, Mr. Clinton has made me think about the last 10 years very differently!" Or perhaps some non-astroturf letters to the editor in St. Louis or Fort Wayne or Wilkes-Barre expressing the same sentiment . . . well, yeah, then I'd feel a little more convinced that there's something actually happening here.

But unless similar evidence appears, I'm going to continue assuming that the transformation wraught by Clinton when he poked Wallace didn't extent very far beyond the discursive turf already controlled by progressive bloggers and liberal pundits.