They Misunderestimate Obama

Watching the Sunday morning shows has really become a dull exercise in witnessing stupidity and ignorance. Having lived near and worked in Washington, DC for a brief period of time (back in the late summer and fall of 2003), I understand well the extent to which the "beltway bubble" exists for those who reside in the District or its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. However, having gratefully escaped these confines and now experiencing politics from outside the DC establishment but still watching its members blather endlessly among themselves, I can only shake my head in puzzlement and bewilderment. That these people get paid--and some of them, large figures--to recite the talking points of the McCain campaign is enough to lead any one watching to throw themselves at the mercy of anything more interesting, even if it is a congressional hearing repeat on C-SPAN.

My rant against the DC media elites stems from their futile attempts to discredit and perhaps in the end even destroy Barack Obama. While it is true that the media were harsher on Clinton than Obama (at least during the first half of the primary; the debate in Philadelphia moderated by Stepinfullofshit and his bff Charlie Gibson) it cannot be argued, at least convincingly and at this point in the general election campaign, that the press has favored Obama over McCain. Just the opposite, in fact. Week after week, mistake after mistake, gaffe after gaffe, the media have given McCain and his allies "Get Out of Jail Free" cards. Barack Obama and his wife exchange a "fist bump" and its the lead story on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, with one commentator even calling it "a terrorist fist jab."

Leaving aside the media's continuing meme that Obama should be polling well ahead of his current standing (as of today, according to the Real Clear Politics average, he is ahead of McCain by 7 points, which is a larger lead than even President Bush had against Senator Kerry in 2004), it has become their weekly, if not daily, ritual to deliver mulligans to McCain but beat Obama over the head with a nine iron. For example, this past week, McCain senior advisor Charlie Black received attention for saying in Forbes magazine that a terrorist attack would bolster McCain's chances in November. Outside of Keith Olbermann's show, neither CNN or FOX or the major news networks ran major stories about Black's comments. McCain supposedly distanced himself from his advisor, saying that he disagreed with them, but would not let him go from the campaign. The McCain-loving media took his answer with a spoonful of gullibility and moved on. Then, Grover Norquist, current president of the right-wing Americans for Tax Reform, described Senator Obama as "John Kerry with a tan." His remarks, made to the Los Angeles Times, didn't even warrant an actual news story; it was only posted on the paper's political blog. Again, besides Keith Olbermann's show, the MSM closed its eyes, plugged its ears, and ran screaming in the other direction, completing ignoring the general election campaign's first use of overt, blatant racism. And, just today, there is a report that McCain and his beer-magnate millionaire wife have not paid taxes on one of their seven properties. Of course, it didn't make the nightly news.

Even as the media continue to attempt to drag down Barack Obama, with the aid of the McCain campaign no less, they do so at their own peril and stupidity, for they have already lost sight of one of the most remarkable feats of this campaign season: For the first time in nearly three decades, the Clintons have been defeated, at the hands of a first-term, black Senator. That Barack Obama has accomplished what the Republicans have attempted to do at least since the early 1990s, and have spent millions of dollars while doing it, should signal, at the very least, to the MSM and the McCainites that Barack Obama and his legion of followers are a force unrecognizable to them and others who have studied American politics for the past half century. That they think they can merely use the same old Rovian tactics and scare voters with Internet smears about Obama, and that they would ironically enlist the so-called liberal MSM as their partners in these endeavors, reveals that they are still living in a fallacy. The old ways of campaigning--the textbook ways of communicating, branding, and attacking--will not work this time around. And they have not worked. If the Republicans and their media whores think that by labeling Senator Obama an elitist, urban liberal who is untested and naive and ill-prepared to answer the phone at 3am, it will break voters into submission and vote for the septuagenarian, just ask the Clintons as to how well that tactic worked out for them.