CT Blue

It’s going to be a long hard slog until November. The Republicans may not know how to govern, but they know how to play the press corps. They bring their A game every time, and the Democrats never seem to know what’s hit them.

Just a few odds and ends that illustrate what Obama is up against.

First, we have the ginned up controversy about his alleged refusal to visit sick troops in Germany. The story is completely false, but that hasn’t stopped the media from almost unanimously repeating it uncritically, as is being documented over at Media Matters. But what’s interesting about this bit of Republican fiction is the fact that the McCain smear ads appear to be directed almost entirely at the media, not directly at the voters. Why spend a lot of money pushing your slime when the media will deliver it for free:

Okay, this is interesting: It looks as if the new McCain ad falsely attacking Obama over his canceled troop visit may not really have a lot of money behind it, suggesting that its real purpose isn’t getting it before voters directly.

Rather, the real target audience may be the media — meaning that the McCain camp’s goal is largely to get the ad debated in the press and to drive the conversation that way.

Evan Tracey, who tracks media buys at the Campaign Media Intelligence Group, took a look at the McCain buys and discovered that an earlier McCain foreign policy attack ad, as well as the troop visit attack spot launched this weekend, are running in almost no battleground-state markets, with the new spot only running in Denver and Washington, D.C

When Obama went on his foreign trip the media was looking for a “gaffe”. There were none, so now they’ve allowed the Republicans to make one up. Meanwhile, John McCain is a gaffe factory, and they go virtually unreported.

It’s really cheaper and more effective to get the media to drive your narrative for you, as has worked so well with McCain’s argument that Obama should be a man and admit he was wrong about the “surge”. Obama has been pestered for a week to recant his opposition to that failed strategy, and to his credit he has resisted. Today he pushed back:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SE-ONd4ACw[/youtube]

The money quote:

You know, I have to say, it is fascinating to me the to hear you guys reemphasize this over and over again. I have not heard yet somebody ask John McCain whether his vote to go into Iraq was a mistake. i haven’t, during the entire week that we were having this conversation.

Besides echoing and amplifying McCain’s talking points, the media will be madly spinning almost everything to bolster McCain. Consider the new Gallup poll out today, that contradicts Gallup’s own tracking poll, since instead of a 9 point Obama lead, it shows a four point McCain lead. How? Here’s how:

In the latter instance, the metric being evaluated was one near and dear to the hearts of pollsters, the “likely voter.” In the earlier poll that showed Obama ahead, Gallup merely surveyed registered voters.

…

Emory Univeristy political scientist Alan Abramowitz broke it down for the Huffington Post. Noting that out of the 900 voter sample surveyed by Gallup/USA Today, the pollsters deemed 791 of those individuals to be “likely” ones, and it is their responses which make up the 49-45 figure that immediately got coverage on MSNBC’s Hardball.

By contrast, the full 900 person sample of registered voters polled by USA Today showed Obama with a 47-44 lead. So what about those 109 likely voters? According to Abramowitz, “among your 109 unlikely voters, according to Gallup, Obama leads McCain by a whopping 61 percent to 7 percent. Putting it another way, according to Gallup 16 percent of registered Obama supporters are unlikely to vote compared with only 2 percent of registered McCain supporters.”

Apparently, we’ve all been missing something, and it’s McCain’s voters who can’t wait to get to the polls.

The media constantly tells us that Obama has a problem with Jewish voters, (e.g. this article) yet, the numbers say that it is McCain that has the problem. Reality will not intrude on this meme; we will hear about it until election eve.

The Republicans accomplish all this by engaging in co-ordinated message delivery and by intimidating that dwindling portion of the press that is not already in their ideological corner. Former Democrats like George Stephanopoulos must prove their bona fides by bending over backwards to prove that they are not in the tank for Democrats. They do so by echoing the right’s talking points. The idiotic surge questions are a case in point. Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t have to prove they are not liberal and make no attempt to hide their biases. Result: except for Keith Olbermann, John Stewart (most of the time) and Stephen Colbert, the media marches to the Republican drumbeat.

The Democrats as an institution deserve their fate, though we citizens are the ones who suffer. Democrats don’t co-ordinate; they don’t push back. The fake story on the troops is a good example. Obama should not need to defend himself on that. The rest of the Democrats should be doing it for him in a coordinated fashion, and they should be accusing the media (and this is mainly the broadcast media) of doing exactly what they are, in fact, doing: echoing Republican talking points.

Don’t hold your breath. The Republicans don’t like McCain, but they’ve circled the wagons. We Democrats leave our candidates exposed, as we did to John Kerry. It may be that the electorate has become inured to Republican sleaze, or that the thought of $5.00 gas, foreclosed homes, and unemployment has induced a little critical thinking in all those folks who figured they should vote for the guy with whom they would want to drink beer. We can only hope. Obama is the far superior candidate, but the fact remains that he is a black (one drop will do) Democrat with a Muslim sounding name. He may be ahead in the polls, but it’s still an uphill battle. The press destroyed Al Gore in 2000, and it enabled the Swift Boaters in 2004. Obama will be battling one Republican fostered media narrative after another until November. It’s going to be a long campaign.