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The defining moment in last year's presidential election was the battle over Sarah Palin. The minute Barack Obama won his party's nomination and delivered his victory speech, John McCain unveiled his surprise running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

During the first news cycle, Palin won rave reviews — a true populist from humble origins who battled the oil interests and drove crooked politicians (including fellow Republicans) from office, she seemed straight out of Central Casting — a telegenic mom married to a rugged athlete with cute kids including a Down syndrome baby she refused to abort.

The American public, like Alaska's voters, loved her story. A Palin boom quickly snuffed out Obama's post-nomination bump and, for the first time, McCain sailed ahead of Obama in the polls.

Then the national media swung into action. If Palin was McCain's magic carpet to the White House, then Palin must be destroyed. What followed was one of the most tawdry and shameful episodes in American journalism. Led by liberal feminist columnists, the mainstream media abandoned every journalistic standard of fairness and professionalism in a massive smear campaign. They attacked her record, her family and her character with every scurrilous rumor and blog post they could dig up. Nothing was out of bounds and/or too low because the media was working for a higher cause — the election of its anointee, Barack Obama.

Now history is repeating itself. The defining moment of the Obama administration appears to be the health care debate. Instead of railroading its program through Congress, the White House is facing a popular uprising led by angry town hall protesters. And, again, Obama is sinking in the polls.

But, instead of listening to the protesters, Obama's team (the Democratic Party and its communications arm, the media) are Palinizing them.

First, they tried dismissing the protests as orchestrated by insurance company lobbyists and the GOP. But as thousands and thousands of ordinary citizens flooded into halls across the nation, that strategy failed.

Next, they presented the protesters as uneducated, unAmerican and out-of-step with mainstream (i.e. liberal) thinking. One Democratic Congressman called them "brown shirts;" another called them racists. The director of Progressive Maryland, a liberal lobbying group, said, "They are crazy, gun-totters, Bible-thumpers. Mostly it's real Marylanders, but they are nut cakes." Alas, as Obama's health care approval rating sank to 46 percent, it became clear that the mutiny extended far beyond some "Bible-thumping nut cakes."

Digging deeper into their bag of dirty tricks, the media next resorted to guilt-by-association, the age old smear tactic of demonizing an entire group by the behavior of a few. (Yes, this is the same media that, otherwise, condemns stereotyping.)

So when one guy turned up with an assault rifle at a Phoenix rally and another wore a pistol at a New Hampshire town hall, their photos were splashed across newspapers and TV screens as typifying all protesters.

Commenting on the assault rifle incident, MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer said, "I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waist." But what MSNBC's Brewer failed to say and what MSNBC's TV clip failed to show was that the man carrying the assault rifle was not white; he was black. But, hey, why let facts get in the way of a good smear campaign?

Likewise, any fool who waves a swastika or a Hitler image gets immediate media air time as representative of all protesters. And the Obama team is willing to link any ugliness to the town hall protesters. So when vandals spray painted swastikas on Georgia Congressman David Scott's office sign, he attributed it to the town halls. And when windows with pro-health care posters were smashed at Colorado's Democratic Headquarters, party chairwoman Pat Waak voiced outrage, "Clearly there's been an effort on the other side to stir up hate. I think this is the consequence of it."

But later, when the culprit was arrested, he turned out to be a Democratic Party worker and anti-war protester who was also arrested in 2008 for disrupting the GOP National Convention. Oops.

So, how low will the media go to manipulate public opinion against the health care protesters? Well, consider this: last week, three neo-Nazi thugs savagely beat a 76-year-old black man who was fishing on a Baltimore pier. Here's The (Baltimore) Sun reporter Nick Madigan's news story: "When people pack assault rifles at presidential forums and town hall meetings dissolve into shouting matches, it's easy to imagine such anger spilling into the nation's simmering stew of racial prejudice…"

"There is no telling whether Calvin E. Lockner, 28, the man charged in the beating early Tuesday was inspired by the national brawl over health care reform, but he told police that he ‘did not like people who were different from him.'"

How's that for a stretch? Town hall protesters, consider yourselves Palinized.

Blair Lee is CEO of the Lee Development Group in Silver Spring and a regular commentator for WBAL radio. His column appears Fridays in The Gazette. His e-mail address is blair@leedg.com.