2012 Presidential Election

After Rick Perry ended his presidential bid on Thursday, the Associated Press's Chris Tomlinson opened his dispatch about the announcement thusly: “Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race on Thursday, endorsed his old friend Newt Gingrich and returned home to Texas, where the failed White House candidate has three years left to serve as the chief executive.” Based on much of his prior reportage, Tomlinson appears have a particular animus towards the Texas Governor. But tagging GOP presidential candidates or their candidacies as “failed” is not an aberration at the AP, while the wire service's omission of such tags on wildly unsuccessful Democratic candidates pointedly betrays the presence of obvious bias. In May 2008, three months after Mitt Romney ended that cycle's presidential bid, an AP report noting his purchase of a California home told readers the following: The AP even made sure in 2007 that John McCain, who was running for the presidency a second time, was tagged as a failure when he announced his bid: “Trailing in national polls and fundraising, the failed candidate of 2000 hopes GOP voters will view him as a principled leader for his unflinching war stance in the face of political pressure and, ultimately, will reward him with the 2008 Republican nomination.” This negativity might be palatable if the self-described Essential Global News Network tagged Democratic primary drop-outs similarly. But the only example I found was one item where the term “failed” apparently disappeared in subsequent revisions. Otherwise, though I saw observations that certain Democratic candidates “failed” to win primaries or caucuses in AP reports, I couldn't find any others where actual candidacies were labeled as failures, as Perry's was, or who were personally labeled as failures, as Romney was. This was the case even among candidates who could not say that they ever came close to winning a primary or caucus (as Romney did in 2008) or who ever led in any pre-primary polls (as Perry did for a time after he declared his candidacy). Democrats not tagged as failures in AP reports include the following poor performers: Joe Lieberman, 2004