The Enlightened Despot

I’ve mentioned before that I find the Obama campaign’s expectations-management to be clumsier and more heavy-handed than anything else they do. I can’t imagine that there’s much overlap between people who pay attention to what campaign insiders are predicting and people who could possibly fail to see through this stuff. But this is truly amazing:

After repeatedly calling Palin first “an extremely good debater,” then a “great” one, at the end he ramped it up to “Gov. Palin is one of the best debaters in American politics,” at which point the press gaggle interrupted him with its laughter. “No, she is! Her 2006 debate, she knew where she wanted to take every question, and so I think she’ll be relentlessly on message tonight and again I’m sure she’ll have any number of biting and witty one-liners but our focus is on the person sitting at home in Canton, Ohio, tonight, Akron, Ohio tonight, struggling economically. Who is delivering a message about an agenda that is going to most positively impact their lives,” he said.

So grab a beer, sit back, and relax. If I’m right, you’re in for some comic gold. If David Plouffe is right, you’re about to see a master of debate perform her art. You really can’t lose.

There has been more and more talk, both laudatory and disapproving, of McCain ‘running against the media’. As I mentioned earlier, the media will not, in fact, be on the ballot in November. It is the Obama-Biden ticket that they have to defeat. And while the appearence of a feud with the media might be helpful, insofar as it makes McCain look good or Obama look bad, there is absolutely zero intrinsic value to scoring victories over the press corps. What the public thinks of the people feeding them news is irrelevant; it is only how the news affects their thoughts on the actual candidates that is of interest.

This should be painfully obvious - indeed, I feel silly for having written the preceding paragraph. But it apparently needs saying because it renders much of what the media-hating members of the media on the right are saying these days. Consider K-Lo (never fun, I realize, but take your medicine):

On Gwen Ifill, Palin said, “I’m not going to let it be a concern.” She said it will “make us work that much harder. She talked about her ticket being the “underdog,” presumably because of the media.

Don’t tell me folks won’t be motivated by this. They will. And the more the media criticizes, it feeds the campaign’s anti-media campaign. It may just be a winning strategy.

If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Kathryn, you are talking drivel again. The “anti-media campaign” very obviously does not become ever more effective as the volume and severity of media criticism increase. Rather, it works best when there are a small but noticeable numbre of clumsy attacks coming from fairly visible but not overly-respected journalists, along with a higher volume of defensive stories about how unfair the media is being by members of that same media who don’t want to be viewed as partisans. There is no shortage of voters who are capable of forming the opinion that the press is being unfair to candidate x based on the press telling them that the press is being unfair to candidate x.

If, on the other hand, everyone in the media were to repeatedly and viciously attack a candidate, there would be no upside there at all. Most voters can’t possibly know when charges against a politician are unfair unless someone in the MSM is reporting on that fact.

What I’ve laid out above are the two extreme states the media could be in in the context of a “campaign against the media”; obviously things will never look quite like either. The problem for McCain is that the current reality is much closer to the latter case than the former. Having the press this unhappy with you isn’t a strategy, it’s a liability.

Frederick, I think it’s safe to say that Sarah Palin is the one lowering the tone here. But, as with so many of life’s mysteries, you need only have turned to K-Lo and you would have found your answers:

Obviously the governor of Alaska reads. And what it looked liked to me is the governor of Alaska decided she wasn’t going to play along with Couric. Whatever she answered would be scrutinized for the next 24 hours for what she included and left off. So instead she let Katie badger her a little. (I half expected Palin to say, Katie, I even have a Blackberry in Alaska!)

And now the ticket is in yet a better position to run against the media.

See? If she’d mentioned any of the newspapers and magazines that she reads, the media would have picked her apart. For 24 hours! Instead, she claimed to read all of them, about which the media won’t have anything to say, certainly not for 24 whole hours.

Pace K-Lo, however, I must point out that whatever this does to the media’s unfavorables, the media isn’t running for president, so McCain and Palin are more or less locked in to running against Obama and Biden. In that context, turning the press against you is actually a bad thing.