Shorthand for Nothing

I really should have written this when it was still relevant, but here it goes.

A number of conservatives make no secret about blaming Barack Obama’s victory in the election on media bias. John McCain’s campaign got only negative coverage, where Obama only got positive coverage. I’m not going to dispute their claim, though I disagree with it. Let’s assume it’s true: the press was exceptionally positive towards Obama and exceptionally negative towards McCain. What could this mean/why could this be? The way I see it, there are four options:

• Barack Obama is legitimately better candidate than John McCain, and the media is merely reflecting the realities of the situation.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but he ran a better, cleaner campaign.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but the media liked him better so he was given a free pass and remained positive in the public perception.
• Barack Obama is a worse candidate than John McCain, but a vast media conspiracy concealed these obvious truths, and tricked the American public into voting for him.

I tend to favor one of the first two options. Though I will acknowledge that Obama was something of a media darling during the summer months, he had already weathered some pretty unpleasant media scandals during the primaries. And let’s face it: he has a compelling narrative.

Obama had people fired up about him irrespective of the media. He had massive support on the internet, and a terrifyingly efficient grassroots political machine.

Those who are inclined to favor the latter two options, I have two words for you: John Kerry. There is no way the media gave Bush more favorable attention than McCain in this election. He was pretty universally reviled at the time.

But even besides that, look at the record turnouts among young voters. If the media is biased, it has always been biased. Something about Barack Obama’s campaign made him popular among a generation of people that is largely disaffected with politics.

And he definitely ran a better campaign to reach these people. He brought technology into politics, in a prominent way. There were internet-based campaigns, and stories written about how internet-based politics were the way of the future. People received updates on text messages. His transition website uses some very web 2.0 technologies. John McCain was not a bad candidate, but his campaign, especially in comparison to that of Barack Obama, made him unelectable. It ruined his brand. It made him look like a bad candidate. He did it to himself, and the electorate responded.

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The more reports I read from the campaign’s postmortem, the less convinced I am that John McCain really had control over his message at the end. Once he had picked Sarah Palin as his running mate and took a hard tack to the right, the campaign had entered into its final stages, with attack ads that took a turn for the nasty and a running mate who seemed to represent everything I have ever disliked about the conservative base. At that point he seemed less interested in acting like the moderate he has developed a reputation for being. It had become a campaign of gimmicks, of erratic and seemingly desperate stabs at the presidency.

Had they recognized they had lost before that point? Did they think their only chance was to hope the conservative base outnumbered Obama’s legion of supporters? Were they counting on the youth vote to be as unreliable as previously? The strategies after the conventions seemed risky. Sarah Palin seemed at once a cynical attempt to attract Hillary’s supporters, a grab to energize the Republican base, and a desperate stab at weakening Obama’s message of change by bringing someone else who can lay claim to being an agent of change.

I am not convinced that balancing act would have been possible even for a political mastermind, and I certainly don’t think Sarah Palin fits the bill. I grant her bloody, luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin that has a name; she may even be intelligent and clever. But she is not cunning. She is a creature of gimmicks. She was also almost entirely unknown, apparently even to the McCain campaign. The convention bounce came, held for a while, then faded into an Obama lead once the public got an idea of who she was–and was less than impressed.

But I’m not really here to talk about why the campaign failed. He was taking some risks and failed. I think they got away from him at some point. He lost balance, things happened too fast, and the only choice was to run with it and hope. I can’t say it was a civil campaign at the end. But I think it is important to remember at least this much: John McCain is not a monster. His supporters are not all hateful fearmongers. Perhaps it’s time to make the attempt to make some unity happen?

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Surprise liveblog, after the jump!

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I’d like to encourage you to take a good look at the picture of Ashley Todd, who didn’t get mugged yesterday. See how the ‘B’ is backwards, sort of like she made it herself, in the mirror? I’m not really here to talk about that, though. Nor about Fox’s prediction that this would sink the race for McCain. There isn’t a lot of insight to add–McCain staffer makes a bad decision, makes headlines, and then admits that she was race-baiting in Pennsylvania.

I’d like to talk about some of the conservative reactions, as collected by Wonkette. It’s not every day the conservatives are dealt a blow like this. Colin Powell elicited a predictable reaction. Most endorsements do. But Ashley Todd? How do they feel about someone taking a risk for their campaign and failing?

If the collection of comments are any indication, the reaction appears to be partly what you would expect–lamenting that someone would risk their campaign’s good standing like that. But it also consists of people claiming she is probably a liberal plant: “Exactly something an idiotic liberal coward would do. bet if you look close enough she’s an obama supporter.” Apparently conservatism is incapable of doing wrong–it is all caused by acts of liberal sabotage.

In all fairness, I do not think conservatives on the whole will be accusing her of deliberate sabotage. Anger at the media makes more sense, for breaking the story in the first place when the police were clearly not convinced of the story. It may not be reasonable to assume the media won’t break a story like this–but it certainly fits in with the conservative metanarrative.

But the fact remains–there are those who are so devout in their support of the cause they believe anyone who does damage to it is a saboteur rather than merely someone who makes bad decisions. Sometimes unquestioning devotion to your cause is a bad thing.

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The conservative forums I have been reading seem to have a common consensus these days: the election is close! Normally I would link to all of the polling sites and political analysts who disagree–who think it is patently obvious at this point that McCain is in dire straits, that the election will likely not be close, and that a McCain victory will be an upset.

I have been saying this election will not be close for a long time (but not blogging about it, so you will have to take my word for it). Partly this was based on political analysts, partly it was based on this feeling that Barack Obama was an exciting candidate. Sure, I worried. But at the same time, there was this feeling of inevitability, one that made it all the more exciting, instead of complacency-inducing.

While I don’t think the McCain campaign should become defeatist, and while I do believe they are flailing around in mad desperation at this point, I believe that a healthy understanding of the polls might benefit their cause.

There’s a bit of a disconnect, though. It’s clear the McCain campaign knows it’s losing. Morale is low, and I think Obama’s feeling of inevitability is beginning to wash the Republican campaign under. But it talks as if it doesn’t believe that. “We’ve got them just where we want them!” Seriously, John? That just makes you sound out of touch–making the defeatism worse while simultaneously making the “it’s a close election and you are all fooled!” people believe it even more.

Whatever is going on internally with the McCain campaign, I can say one thing with conviction: this is not a close election. I would be much less enthusiastic if it were.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Colin Powell has just endorsed Barack Obama, and the conservative base is not pleased with the result. He has “betrayed his party,” “revealed his true leaning,” and basically all sorts of nasty words. Perhaps this is a minority representation–I’m still looking into a more representative reaction–but this is pretty much exactly what I expected.

It reveals a lot about the campaign. Let’s go back to John McCain for a minute. He’s a maverick, right? He leans across party lines. He’s got half the Democratic ticket from 2000 endorsing him. He fights his own party leaders. He does this because he is bipartisan and compromises.

Colin Powell is, as far as I am aware, is a highly respected public figure, which may well sound the death knell for McCain’s political chances. I believe he is respected across party lines. If anyone’s endorsement would likely be viewed as “mavericky,” as something indicative of a strong independent mind and reasoning apart from party lines, I think it would be Colin Powell’s. But instead, it’s casually dismissed as treason to his party, probably because they are both black.

Obama is routinely criticized for never reaching across the aisle by the conservative base. He is “the most liberal Senator.” I wonder if this isn’t because everyone who ever works with Barack Obama is immediately dismissed as a traitor to his party?

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First and foremost I’m a writer, or at least someone who appreciates the English language. One of the reasons I like Barack Obama is because he is so good with words. He is a masterful rhetorician and I appreciate that. He can phrase things in a delicate and precise fashion. Contrast this with John McCain’s strategies. He appears to have found a few words and phrases that draw a positive reaction, and he is going to keep using them well after the point the American people are tired of them.

As you probably assumed, I am talking about the word ‘maverick.’ It is a word sort of like rogue or scoundrel–it has powerful connotations that have very little to do with the actual definition of the word. It means ‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person.’ On the lips of John McCain and his surrogates, it means he is the political equivalent of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. It means he’s taking the fight to all the corrupt politicians in Wall Street. He’s ‘taken on his own party leadership!’ He’s a maverick!

But it’s gone beyond that. Now Sarah Palin is a maverick, too! What makes her unorthodox or independent-minded, it’s hard to say, but they’re just a couple of mavericks, apparently, going in to shake up Washington. A vote for McCain/Palin is a vote for mavericks!

Ultimately I can’t help the feeling when watching McCain or Palin speak, or reading their press releases, that if politics was a video game, McCain/Palin are button mashing. They’ve found a move that worked pretty good the first time, and they are mashing that button as hard as they possibly can.

It was a hard fight going in. McCain has never been the obvious choice to win, and was only really ahead during the post-convention bounce. He has to follow eight years of an extremely unpopular president, and a failing economy. He had to convince the American people that what they really wanted was four more years of a Republican in the White House. The maverick thing might have worked early on, even. But he needed more of a flourish. Less repeating lines. Less off the wall attacks. He needed something masterful. Brilliant rhetoric, a strategic followup to all of his maverick lines that left his opponent open and reeling.

And he tried for it, but he came off as erratic, senile, lurching from one gimmick to the next, hoping it would work for him, discarding it when it wasn’t immediately successful. Soon they were dismissed as the gimmicks they were, so he is left mashing the two buttons he knew worked: ‘call yourself a maverick’ and ‘call the other guy a terrorist.’ But button-mashing is never an effective strategy, especially once everyone knows you’re doing it.

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