Liberal blogger Will Bunch says "Bush gamed the media to get re-elected in 2004" and suggests that by not running the NSA story the New York Times helped him win last November:

It's too early to gauge reaction, but we expect that it [the NSA story] will be highly negative, not just from the usual suspects on the left but also from the vast political middle -- the heartland types who just barely propelled Bush to re-election in 2004.

And there lies the real story behind the story. Because it appears it may have been possible for the Times to publish at least some of the details of the Bush-ordered domestic spying before Nov. 2, 2004, the day that the president nailed down four more years. Although Bush won by 2 percent nationally, a switch of just 59,302 Ohio voters from Bush to John Kerry would would have put the Democrats back in the White House.

Would Bush won the election if the extent of his seemingly unconstitutional domestic spying had been known? We'll never know.

Here we see more evidence that the left is much closer to being divorced from reality than it is to being "reality-based."  Not to beat a dead horse, but as John has now stated twice in the last two days (here and here), liberals really don't have a clue how bad of an issue this is for them politically.

If the New York Times had published this story prior to the 2004 election it would have been a disaster for John Kerry. Kerry would have looked weaker than ever spouting legalisms and spinning the nuances of Constitutional law while Bush stood there telling the folks he was doing everything he could to protect them from the evil-doers. 

How do we know this is so? Because the election in November was fundamentally about strength on national security, and the country judged Bush superior to Kerry in that regard. Remember the lead Bush jumped out to after the Republican National Convention and the anniversary of September 11? Now imagine what Zell Miller would have said about John Kerry opposing an NSA program to monitor suspected terrorist-related calls.

Remember also that even as the race tightened down the stretch, the final nail in Kerry's coffin was the appearance of a videotape of Osama bin Laden.  Kerry tried to counter the tape with some macho mumbo-jumbo about tracking bin Laden down himself, but it was too little too late. The public simply didn't trust John Kerry to do as good of a job protecting the country as Bush. The NSA surveillance story would have only made the choice that much more clear to voters and, contra Bunch's suggestion, it probably would have showed in the results.

A final bone to pick: the implication being made by Arianna and others that the New York Times was somehow in the tank for the Bush administration gives the word "ludicrous" a bad name. This the same paper that blacked out the Swift Boat Veterans story for more than two and half weeks before running a front page story attacking the connections between the Swiftees and Karl Rove. If memory serves it's the same paper that colluded with CBS News on the timing and publication of the National Guard fake document story that exploded into Memogate. And it's the same paper that dumped the dubious, anonymously-sourced story of al-Qaqaa on the front page just eight days before the election.

Liberals can fume over The Times' decision to sit on this story, but all likelihood Keller & Co. did Democrats a favor by not running it before last year's election.