The vast majority of the LameStreamMedia are still in the bag for Obama, but in pendulum fashion, the press likes to swing back and forth as a monolithic force. This is a natural thing: they build up, there is a big story to a Cinderella coming out of nowhere and being the front runner. Then, the only logical story is to knock him back down. Still, they have to have ammunition, and Obama is giving them plenty.
First there was the 100 years remark that Obama milked at partisan speeches to great acclaim from the dirty hippies, union thugs, welfare queens and Kool-Aid drinkers who frequent Democrat rallies. Who the fuck actually goes to political rallies? You have to be a hard core, no life having, jobless fuck to go stand around for hours waiting for the rockstar to show up and give a canned stump speech.
Those applause lines traditionally went unchallenged, but in today’s YouTube drenched civilization, you can’t get away with that shit anymore. What’s amazing is that the MSM is picking it up. And right at the time Obama is on a downswing right before Pennsylvania.
Heh, one pundit says Hillary shouldn’t get too cocky from that one poll. Seriously, none of this will mean a hill of beans in a week, let alone a month or two.
This will swing back again, of course, but the drip drip drip is not good for Obama. The default position is that America is not prone to elect an inexperienced, divisive black victimhood demagogue, so all this stuff is definitely good for McCain, who only needs the status quo to win. Obama needs a lot of help from his media allies, but as Kerry showed, this alone can’t put you over the top. But without it, does he even stand a chance?
Obama’s secret weapon: the media
By JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI | 4/18/08 7:05 PM EST
My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.
Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?
Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.
That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places — who are doing the whining.
The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.
Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.
But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.
The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.
[…]
Moreover, those questions about Jeremiah Wright, about Obama’s association with 1960s radical William Ayers, about apparent contradictions between his past and present views on proven wedge issues like gun control, were entirely in-bounds. If anything, they were overdue for a front-runner and likely nominee.
If Obama was covered like Clinton is, one feels certain the media focus would not have been on the questions, but on a candidate performance that at times seemed tinny, impatient and uncertain.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
The odd thing is that this is getting reported: it will make reporters who indulge in Obama worship squirm a bit, and hopefully embarrass them into moderating their most flagrant hackism.
Here’s Obama engaging in the very shit he claimed he was above:
via Jennifer Rubin
Hi, Mr. Hypocrite!
Jennifah sez:
First we had the 100 days exchange, in which the mainstream media sided with John McCain, calling out Barack Obama for repeatedly misstating McCain’s words. Then, on Friday, Obama lifted a single line from a McCain interview to support his claim that McCain believes there has “been great progress economically over the last seven and a half years,” despite growing evidence that we are in economic trouble.
However, this time the McCain team was monitoring the cable news. They quickly put out a video showing the full McCain statement and Obama did not get away with his verbal sleight of hand. Within the same news cycle, mainstream media and non-partisan online news outlets picked up the video and reported the discrepancy between Obama’s take on McCain and McCain’s actual words.
What does this tell us? Obama’s staffers, perhaps lulled into an understandable sense of security, think they can slip misleading snippets of McCain statements into Obama speeches and interviews. But in a YouTube world, this is becoming increasingly hard.
Lawrence Kudlow has some thoughts on the media “attacking” Obama:
It’s rather amusing watching the liberal media launch a full-scale attack on George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, with General Tom Shales of the Washington Post leading the charge. ABC’s Stephanopoulos and Gibson had the audacity to ask Obama some tough questions during the Democratic debate Tuesday night. Challenge Obama with well-informed questions on tax policy and politics? Wound the media favorite? How dare they?
The fallout is fascinating. With members of the mainstream liberal media lunging at each others throats, it’s kind of like watching Hillary and Obama go at it.
But here’s the deal: During the debate, Obama bungled his answers on tax policy, big time. Period. End of sentence. End of story. To my liberal friends in the media, all I can say is: Get over it. Your guy has a very poor grasp of basic economic principles.
First off, you don’t raise taxes during a recession. That’s a no-brainer. Second, doubling the capital-gains tax rate will affect Americans up and down the income ladder, not just rich hedge-fund managers. In addition, capital-gains tax cuts are self-financing, and they stimulate jobs and the economy. You want to raise budget revenues and spark economic growth? Cut the cap-gains tax rate. That’s what history shows.