Russ Smith on the Obama campaign
newsletter:
[L]et's be clear: the Times had forced McCain to walk
their well-appointed plank months before he chose Palin. On Feb. 21
of this year, a front-page story in the Times . . . implied that
the Arizona senator had an extra-marital relationship with Vicki
Iseman, a lobbyist for telecommunications companies. After the
story appeared, the Times was roundly criticized, and not
just by conservative journalists, for its salacious suggestions. So
it seems that McCain, at least on trial before the Times' judges,
was deemed guilty of breaking the conduct of principle and honesty
before the vast majority of Americans had even heard the name Sarah
Palin.
In many ways, the trajectory of the McCain campaign has mirrored
that of George Allen's 2006 re-election campaign.
There were early indications in 2006 that the media were gunning
for Allen -- who was then every conservative's odds-on bet for the
GOP 2008 presidential nomination -- but the Allen campaign failed
to engage the emergent narrative. (Excuse this lapse into media
analyst jargon.) Then, when the "Macaca" video hit, it was like
popping the top of a well-shaken bottle of beer-- a torrent of
negative media coverage that the campaign could not stop.
So, too, with McCain this year. Between Feb. 7, when Mitt Romney
effectively ceded the Republican nomination, and Aug. 29, when
Palin was named as nominee, the media had clearly shown that it
viewed Obama as the inevitable and deserving winner. (Ask Hillary
Clinton about that.) But the McCain campaign hadn't really started
pushing back against the "inevitability of Obama" narrative until
July. By then, however, the media had already elected Obama in its
own collective mind, so that McCain's attempt to win the election
was viewed as fundamentally illegitimate.
The media turned Sarah Palin into McCain's "Macaca moment." But
a failure of media relations is always a two-way street, and the
GOP's image problem -- of which this episode is an illustrative
example -- is not entirely a function of liberal bias.
topics:
Sarah Palin, NATO
