Judging by the treatment Sarah Palin is receiving from the media, a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that she is the candidate for president and John McCain is her running mate. Wednesday evening she arrived back in her home state of Alaska and all three cable news networks interrupted their programming to air her remarks to an adoring crowd. That’s funny, because I don’t recall the media dropping everything and rushing to Wilmington, Delaware to capture the live broadcast of Joe Biden’s homecoming.
Virtually every report from the Republican campaign trail is about Palin. McCain has become an appendage to whom little attention is paid except to inquire as to how awesome it is to be with Sarah. All anybody is talking about is pigs, lipstick, and mooseburgers. There is very little public discussion of … um, what do you call them … oh yeah, “issues.” This is no accident. The McCain team has finally figured out a way to avoid substance entirely and keep their elderly candidate from getting fatigued. Just give the spotlight to Palin and let her tap dance around the country while McCain catches forty winks in the wings.
A lot has been made (by me) of Palin’s stonewalling of the press. It has been 13 days since she was selected to join McCain and she has still not had a press conference or sat for an interview with a reporter. My Palin Watch widget is documenting how long she is dodging the media. She is scheduled to end that streak with an interview by Charlie Gibson this week. But lost in the shuffle is that McCain himself is nearly as evasive as Palin. Since July 27 (45 days), McCain has appeared only twice on a national news program. That’s a remarkable turnaround for a man who has set records for media whoring.
Palin’s new status as a celebrity pol is confirmed by the attention she is getting from inside the campaign Wurlitzer. She is now attended to by a high-level crew of former Bush, and current McCain, cronies. The cast includes:
- Taylor Griffin – Bush campaign aide.
- Tracey Schmitt – Bush campaign aide.
- Tucker Eskew – Bush campaign aide.
- Steve Biegun – Bush National Security Council.
- Mark Wallace – Bush deputy campaign manager.
- Nicolle Wallace – Bush/McCain communications director.
- Douglas Holtz-Eakin – McCain economic adviser.
- Randy Scheunemann – McCain senior foreign-policy adviser.
- Joe Donoghue – McCain Senate aide.
Talk about “just more of the same…” This contingent of familiar handlers is busily preparing Palin for her get together with Gibson. They traveled to Fairbanks with her this evening and are expected to be drilling her non-stop (get your minds out of the gutter) for her debut encounter with the national media. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a not particularly ominous interrogator like Gibson. Either she aces this test or the speculation that she is a lightweight, insufficiently vetted, politically convenient, ideologically eccentric character from Bizarro World, will be forever burned into the public mind – if it’s not too late already.
I just wanted to suggest that you update this article with the information about the nature of the interview. About how the reporter is being asked to travel to see the candidate and how the interview is to be spread out over several sessions thus ensuring that any objectionable questions will not be asked for fear that the remainder of the interview would be cancelled. The campaign should not be allowed to dictate to the media in such a profoundly biasing way.
Thanks. I think you just updated it for me.
I will add that on Fox News Sunday McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said:
The campaign also said that the press has to treat her “deferentially.” These are ridiculous and unheard of preconditions for journalists.
Obama and his supporters don’t get it now. Never did.
I’ve been telling anyone who would listen put a woman on the ticket. Preferably Hillary and, if Obama is too small for that, go for Sebelius. Nope. I warned folks about the Palin threat – I even commented on it here. Nope. McCain’s a joke. Obama’s got it in the bag.
Ka-boom! The Palin hammer drops.
Liberal liberals, the Obama supporters, are stirred up like hornets. Smearing Palin. Personal attack. Pooh-poohing her. This crap just backfires. Folks, she’s the real deal.
Oh, no. She’s a lightweight that McCain’ll hide until the election. I argue otherwise. Folks don’t listen. I just watched part one of the Gibson interview. He asked some tough questions. Pressed her on answers. But, in the end, she was tough. No gaffs. No ums and ahs. No pulling notes out of her socks.
Obama has something like 55 days to fix the mess he made because, despite his happy talk about being a unifier, he couldn’t swallow his pride and pick Hillary to unify the party.
According to a non-partisan anchor on XM’s POTUS 08, he talked to the Obama campaign. He’s being advised by the Democrats to ignore Palin and she’ll fade away. Lucky for us, Obama saw Hillary play that game when he was the hot new thing. It killed her campaign. So he plans a post-9/11 attack on Palin he’s just clueless how to go about it.
His best hope, IMHO, is to call her out on the issues and prove to women who used to support him – like the Hillary supporters who’ve bailed on him – that she’s way too far right of them. The problem with that is the women I’ve talked to who’ve switched are more interested in her life story that resonates with them than they are abortion rights, gun control, drilling in wilderness areas, etc.
Blaming the media is stupid. Obama supporters whining the media is paying Palin too much attention look like the right-wingers whining once upon a time the media loved Obama.
Maybe she’ll make a huge gaff. Maybe a scandal will take her down. But I doubt it. She isn’t the fool Obama supporters have tried to maker her out to be. Nor is she the nut case the endless smears coming from the left would have us believe.
Palin is not a hammer and she has not dropped. She is a roman candle and she is about to flame out.
She had several gaffes in her interview with Gibson (i.e. she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was; she advocated war with Russia).
Obama is quite right to focus on McCain. Palin is not a factor. VPs never are. She is blip of the sort that the media loves to elevate. Unfortunately for her, the media also loves to knock down what they previously raised. Just watch – It’s coming.
However, the main point of this post is that the media now seems to regard McCain as an afterthought. If there is one thing that we learn from Palin’s emergence it is that it is McCain who is the lightweight who cannot sustain this campaign by himself.
And I still thank God that Hillary is not on the ticket. The party has united behind Obama, and Hillary would just have fired up conservatives.