US News and World Report cites research showing—pleasingly for self-satisfied liberals—that followers of the posh magazines and radio stations are smarter than Joe Sixpack and the rest of America's dumb masses. The four "best-informed" news audiences are those of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's and NPR, according to the news weekly. Um, except not really.
Dear Project For Excellence in Journalism: please just stop. Stop doing these studies or just stop releasing your so-called "empirical" findings to the press. Because Howard Kurtz "reporting" that the press is so mean to John McCain and so nice to Barack Obama all the time is not "excellent journalism." It is more like "the Project for No Context and More Bullshit in Journalism." Christ, PEJ, how does it further excellent journalism, learning this factoid:
So the story of Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on clothes? Brother, it gets better. See, the RNC is required by law to list who exactly bought all the fancy clothes. And all the Sarah Palin fancy purchases—at Barney's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks Fifth Avenue—were made by one guy: Jeff Larson. Jeff Larson is one of the men behind FLS Connect, a Republican robocalling firm! They're famous this cycle for terrible robocalls about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. And back in 2000, they made their name with robocalls smearing John McCain. It's funny because John McCain sold his soul and all it got him was a fancy new wardrobe for Sarah Palin. [Atlantic]
The explosive New York Times Magazine story on the complete disarray of the McCain campaign is live online! It's full of revealing exclusive info that one was previously forced to just infer based on the available evidence! Like: the tone, strategy, and narrative of McCain's campaign has been inconsistent because the candidate himself is terrible with organization and consistency, and has relied on metanarrative crafter/biographer Mark Salter, Rovian media guru Steve Schmidt, and close friend and day-to-day campaign head Rick Davis to work it all out between the three of them. And there is infighting, of course, and everyone will soon blame everyone else, but honestly the ultimate responsibility for the failure of the campaign (should it fail in two weeks, obv) comes down to Senator McCain. He's a terrible candidate, unable to read from teleprompters and unwilling to do campaign events before 9 a.m.. He chafes at taking directions—told to gently explain once in the first debate that Obama might not understand an issue, McCain condescendingly repeated the mantra "Senator Obama doesn't understand..." ten times. These are unfair and surely maddening criticisms—ability to read from a teleprompter is not actually that presidential a quality, or else Sarah Palin would be qualified—but this is the world we live in, and GOP strategists certainly helped create it. But more importantly, his high self-regard makes him utterly unable to forgive or get over minor personal slights. He can't understand why everyone else doesn't see how much of an unprepared phony Barack Obama is, and the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" attitude is always, always a loser—ask the last five Democrats to run for President not named Clinton. His ability to justify his own inconsistencies isn't shared by the electorate either. In his mind, he can square Palin's inexperience and robocalls and negative campaigning with the honorable man he's always been. The constant schizophrenic narrative changes are, of course, Steve Schmidt's fault. And here's some inside shit on the Palin pick—the serious grownups had a decent shortlist that included Pawlenty, Romney, and even Bloomberg. But they weren't exciting and mavericky ernough, so Schmidt and Davis quietly picked Palin based entirely on image without examining substance.
Cindy McCain is the saddest figure in this miserable election. Seriously, we feel real sympathy for this woman, rich and brittle and Obama-smearing though she may be. We read the Ariel Levy story. She's got a distant, temperamental, emotionally abusive husband she never sees (until election season!) and she can't even develop a painkiller addiction in peace without the press jumping all over it (because her family certainly didn't notice or care). So it's cruel, really, that the National Enquirer is jumping all over the various obvious easily disproved lies she's told on the campaign trail about meeting Mother Theresa and visiting her husband's Vietnamese hospital bed. You can click to read the story, though you won't learn anything you didn't learn from the Levy profile and the New York Times piece on her sad life.
Everyone is always babbling about the "Bradley Effect"—the supposed tendency of white people to tell pollsters they'll vote for a black guy even though they're racist and won't—and how it might hurt Barack Obama in two weeks. But honestly the Bradley Effect doesn't seem to be applicable this year. Not because white people are less racist, but because they have no good reason to lie about supporting McCain. John McCain's current Election Exit Strategy seems to hinge on Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and he's going to get those states back in his corner by scaring the shit out of white people. Will it work? McCain might want to look at the dire position modern white supremacist organizations are in; they can barely rile up the neo-Nazis to care that a black guy might be the next president! American National Socialist Workers Party head Bill White may be a neo-Nazi, but he's not voting for John McCain.
The debates are done. The mail-in election has already started. The Obama campaign will go on hiatus for a couple of days while he visits his ailing grandmother. So it's a good time to pause and take stock. Rather, it's a good time for our resident armchair political strategist Peter Feld to pause and take stock. The former Dukakis adviser will be hanging around the comments to answer your questions.
The "voting" bit of the endless 2008 election has not yet happened, but honestly the winner of that particular contest is of little concern to anyone but plumbers and unemployed auto workers and ladies who want their precious "abortions." No, from here, two weeks out from Election Day, with Obama suspending his campaign and John McCain abandoning swing states, we can already plainly see who's really come out on top over these last couple months. Media whores! And, you know, media people who we actually like and wouldn't therefore call "whores." After the jump, the five real winners of the 2008 elections.
Boy another stunt from the Obama campaign, it makes us sick. The radical Democratic candidate is leaving the campaign trail for "more than 36 hours" to head over to exotic, foreign "Hawaii" to look after his 85-year-old grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is "gravely ill." Mrs. Dunham raised young Obama for many of his childhood years, and she's among the last of his immediate family left. As we all also know, Obama hates his terrible racist grandmother with a fiery angry black radical passion, because she is a racist. We know this because in a frank and honest interview following his smart and important speech on race, he called her a "typical white person" because she is at heart a kind and good person who sometimes feels irrational prejudices. This enraged Geraldine Ferraro, and others. It was a punchline at The Corner for a good six months. As we all know it is very important for a young man of mixed racial background raised by white people to never acknowledge that those white people are anything but idealized perfection incarnate. To admit that you are pained when they reveal deep-set prejudices is nothing but PLAYING THE RACE CARD. It is disgusting that Barack Obama will now have us believe that he "loves" his grandmother. We expect the conservative commentariat to back us up on this point shortly.
Well isn't this handy! Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz has produced a list of the 36(!) Jews "who have shaped the 2008 U.S. election." That is a lot of them! It really takes so many to run the world? This is not even all the Jews involved in deciding who will next lead this glorious Christian nation! "But the Jewish vote remains a key element in battleground states, and, playing a wide variety of roles, Jews have helped to shape the campaigns. Thirty-six of them are mentioned below. This list is by no means all-inclusive, and, for considerations of space, many Jews who have played active parts in the campaigns do not appear," Haaretz explains. Still, it is nice of them to provide in one convenient location all the people who the crazies will blame for stealing the election next month. Streisand! (Listed: the original Lehman brother who is long dead. Not listed: all the other evil Wall Street people who burned all the money.) [Haaretz]
The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!
God, John McCain is just sick of running for president. Even in the cozy environs of Fox News Sunday, questioned by the friendly Chris Wallace, he's absolutely unable to justify to himself the various hideous missteps of his miserable campaign. That Sarah Palin pick? Well, he half-heartedly argues, it'll piss off the feminists. What a great reason to make her your successor, John. And then he offers, on the subject of Governor Palin's selection, the type of "joke" that is utterly serious: "as a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased." Ugh.
It's been painted as a reconciliation, but McCain's appearance on Letterman last night was a sorry spectacle. Letterman spent half the interview talking to McCain like he talks to Paris Hilton—an object of obvious scorn—and half of it trying quite hard to get McCain to admit that the Ayers line is useless bullshit and that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment. McCain squirmed. He hasn't done The Daily Show in a while, either, presumably for fear of a similar line of questioning. Which is sad! Because McCain loved doing those shows! He loved being the funny, charming, lovable, funny old man of the Senate! Watching him at the Al Smith dinner, you see the obvious joy he took in just getting laughs in a friendly room again. Which is exactly why McCan needs to lose this race. We're not going to argue about the security of this country, about McCain's sense of "honor," about the toxic atmosphere of the campaign, no—we're just talking about McCain's simple enjoyment of his own privileged life. McCain's humor has always been caustic, mean, sarcastic, and cruel—"thanks for the question, you little jerk" is hardly an example of wit, funny though it is—and it is sometimes a window into a dark, deep embitterment. It doesn't work politically, in the way the Reagan's genial old wisecracks worked. A president needs, to a certain extent, to be somewhat humorless. McCain's sense of humor is dark enough to make that need doubly true in his case. And it's clear McCain hates the grab-and-grin aspect of the race. He's never cared for the idiot rabble of "the base," and they've never cared for him. He's energized by the Sunday Morning Shows, not by a rally crying for blood. He took the mic away from that crazy lady because she was embarrassing him. Those aren't his people. He's not enjoying himself. And McCain palling around with Jon Stewart and Dave Letterman was certainly more fun to watch before this miserable race. It's easy to say that all McCain wants in this world is to be president, but honestly it sometimes seems like all he wants is to already have been president. Who wouldn't want to be Bill Clinton before he embarrassed himself during this campaign? Or Bush Senior after everyone forgot his miserable single term in office? Should McCain lose, he can hopefully look forward to a happy post-election media good will tour, and all his sins will be again forgotten. Maybe he can crack wise on Palin and Ayers. We'll happily let him go back to the way things were, with only a minimum of chastising those who take him back—as long as he promises never to run for president again.
No wonder he's losing! As was revealed in the Washington Post recently, John McCain's remote Arizona ranch features a lovely Verizon cell phone tower. Cindy, it turns out, asked for a tower back a couple years back. Verizon, remembering the Senator's wonderful work on behalf of the telecommunications industry during his time on the Commerce Committee, spent two years investigating the environmental and commercial impact of placing a permanent cell tower on the Senator's land, far, far, far away from anyone else who might benefit from it. Cindy says she asked for no special treatment, but the fact that Verizon's internal map of the area refers to it as "John McCain's ranch" suggests she may have been receiving it regardless. But this is the real story: while researching the environment impact of the tower, Verizon turned up evidence of an ancient Indian burial ground on McCain's property! Sort of! As Josh Green explains it:
Are you one of those crazy nuts who thinks there's no difference between the parties? Who thinks maybe that a small, elite ruling class just rearranges the nameplates every couple years to keep the rubes happy? Who suspects perhaps that the English Royal Family, along with the Illuminati, run a massive conspiracy to keep American political power in the hands of a secretive class of lizard aliens? Well then you certainly won't be dissuaded from your beliefs by the annual Al Smith dinner, an annual white tie affair at which the supposedly bitter rivals for the presidency swap funny funny jokes at each others' expense. DC has like three of these things every year too. Because partisanship is just a distraction to keep you from learning the truth! The truth that is exposed every year only by the cameras of C-SPAN! Oh, John McCain killed it. He was really funny! His speech is attached. Barack Obama's speech was actually pretty great too, his is after the jump.
Gee, it's almost like Barack Obama's campaign predicted McCain would distance himself from President Bush at last night's debate! How else could they have put together this clever ad refuting McCain's crazy claim that he's not George W. Bush? More importantly: they highlighted all the mugging and blinking because that's the important message here. They're very good, right? [via Radosh]
So when you watch the debates, do you stick around for the analysts and pundits afterwards? Do you find out how Chris Matthews and David Gergen and Larry King felt? Do you need to find out what the conventional wisdom is before you go to bed? Figure out the narrative, find out who "won" in the eyes of the newsmedia? You don't need to bother anymore. All three debates this year have followed the exact same script: the expectations set by the campaigns are self-contradictory and confused, the debates seem boring and repetitive, and following each one pundits agree that John McCain won "on points," whatever that means. Then the snap polls come in! Last night, Andrea Mitchell tentatively tried to claim, once again, that McCain won "on points," everyone agreed that McCain was feistier and got better zingers in, everyone fixated on the "I'm not George Bush" line as the best of the debates, Joe the Plumber was supposed to be the story of the day, and overall everyone wanted a narrative shift to a McCain comeback, because that's a better story. But the voters didn't care. CBS undecideds: Obama 53, McCain 22. CNN poll: Obama 58, McCain 31. MediaCurves independents: Obama 60, McCain 30. John King tried to explain away his own poll's bias toward Democrats even as the independents they polled when for Obama by 26 points. This is bad news for pundits! Because one very important role a pundit is supposed to play is recognizing and explaining the mood of the nation. They are supposed to predict, based on their experience and wisdom, what voters want to hear and what they will respond to. And this season, they've been dead fucking wrong, over and over again. But more importantly, the numbers are proving them wrong objectively, and they're forced to correct themselves immediately. In previous election cycles, the numbers could say it was a narrow Gore victory or statistical tie, but the punditry could shift those numbers over a weekend through relentless repetition of the narrative they invented, making it a lopsided Bush gain by Monday. It's much, much harder for Maureen Dowd to control—or even reflect—the "narrative" of the campaign now, because the internet makes all the raw data available and everyone has access to it. We never intend to write a "hooray the internet is correcting and democratizing the MSM" piece but in this instance it does seem to be a useful corrective to the tendency of people like Chris Matthews to mistake their own fevered imaginations for the mood of a nation.
You know what is weird and fascinating and taking up a great deal of our time today? Watching old episodes of The Daily Show from Election 2000. Jon Stewart was so young! And marginally less outraged all the time! (Though it is quite clear that the 2000 election shifted him with surprising speed from the sarcastic MTV alt-comedian of the '90s to the sarcastic outraged cataloger of horrors that he is today.) (Also Stephen Colbert was an amazing performer even then.) So check up on the depressing third debate between Al Gore and George Bush! Or watch with us the prescient "negative campaigning" debate between Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, after the jump. And weep for your lost youth! Click to view
