Steve Schmidt Orders His Own Personal Wahhhmbulance

This has to be the most pathetic conference call in the history of conference calls.

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

The best part of this is the response comment from McCain HQ: "You are in the tank." Because if you don't give McCain's team the final cut on all your stories you might as well have written "Yes We Can" 1,000 times. Joe Klein 2.0 comments on this and tells the truth:

1. he's hoping to work the refs: if he complains enough about press bias, we mainstream sorts will cower, cringe and try to seek false equivalences between the two campaigns.

2. the more time we spend covering this nonsense, the less we'll spend on the real issues in this campaign.

Sorry, Steve. Not buying.

Well, mostly not buying. Ruth Marcus is down for a ride on the tire swing. But the WaPo editorial page is pretty pissed off, which is unusual.

Just calling a press conference to say "Stop calling me a liar!" instead of "I'll stop lying" is pathetic in and of itself. But it's even more so on a day when the McCain campaign releases their Obama's a straight-up Chi-town street hustler ad, and then asks for leniency from the press. Win or lose, they are really terrible human beings.

Feel The Whine

As McCain videos go, these aren't actually too bad. But I can't see the line of reasoning working that "the media is in the tank for Obama" when McCain has had a free ride from the media literally his entire career. Not to mention that several of the quotes in here are from Clinton surrogates at a time when they were trying to beat Obama in a primary election. Also, having Tucker Carlson comment in an objective fashion on anything is suspect. But the point is that the raw material is there to make pretty much whatever narrative to want, and this one is particularly designed to work the refs.





This is really the new tactic. Conservatives are whining about McCain's NYT op-ed being rejected (even though Rupert Murdoch's New York Post picked it right up). They're whining that the anchors of the three nightly news bureaus accompanied Obama to the Middle East and Europe. They're whining about this "media love". They're very transparently working the refs. And if it fails, they'll whine some more about the media delivering the election, and on and on. Once again, the very issue that liberals have been so successful in identifying and denouncing - media bias - is being co-opted by the right using the same methods.

But let's remember we've all seen the McCain Love video. It's called watching the last dozen years of political television. Indeed, the political press's reckless and giddy love for McCain is so universally acknowledged that McCain himself has often joked about the press as his "base." So what do we have here but a candidate who can't brook the idea of not campaigning on a wave of press adulation? And now he's framing his whole candidacy around a campaign of strategic whining about the claim that the political press is treating his younger opponent like he's been treated for over a decade. He's got the preening and envy of a sore losing runner-up for prom queen.

Thom Hartmann had some fun with a flak from the Media Research Center who was pitching this same whine, and he asked if it meant there should be a return to the Fairness Doctrine, and the guy froze.

A lot of these things are based on performance. Obama has pretty smoothly orchestrated this trip, while McCain has spent the past few weeks serving up gaffe after gaffe. Oftentimes you get the coverage you deserve. But hearing this whine job from the very conservative forces who have controlled the media engine for the last decade is truly laughable.

UPDATE: For those interested, here's a trip down memory lane. This wasn't even that long ago.

Such ground rules must go down easier with a tour of the grounds and a plateful of McCain-made ribs. (While, apparently, “objectivity prohibits a good reporter” like Reuters’ Jeff Mason from telling readers how tasty McCain’s ribs were, CBS’s Dante Higgins “is confident in reporting they were succulent and flavorful”). In return for dropping “political talk,” reporters got their candidate-cooked meal. And a tire swing. And Frank Sinatra tunes on the deck.

And McCain, in return, got press coverage depicting a relaxed, confident, regular-like-you-and-me-but-also-very-much-in-charge guy holding court at what could well be, as so many reporters noted, the future Western White House. (Could rib-grilling be the new brush-clearing? Just as manly - and sticks to reporters’ ribs!)

Whining Their Way To Electoral Glory

The story so far - Barack Obama pens an op-ed in the New York Times giving his plan for Iraq and Afghanistan. John McCain offers a rebuttal that is one long "WAHHH but you want us to lose and you smell and have cooties and I am ROXXOR!!!!!ELEVEN!!" The New York Times, in a rare moment of editorial discretion, rejects it. And explained why:

Thank you for sending me Senator McCain’s essay.

I’d be very eager to publish the senator on the Op-Ed page.

However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written. I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft. Let me suggest an approach.

The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.

It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.

This is something that occurs on every op-ed in your local paper. It's called "what an editor does." It's also NYT policy to print rebuttals on the Letters to the Editor page and opinions on the opinions page.

The right has an old-fashioned freakout.

Now, the idea that the media gates are being blocked to St. Barbecue McCain is ridiculous enough to put this whole freak-out to rest. It's not that he really wants to appear in the New York Times - the same paper he and the conservative movement routinely deride on the campaign trail. It's that they want to discredit the media in general as being in league with Obama and dedicated to helping him win in November, and their spin is starting to work.

This is part and parcel of the strategy to work the refs, get favorable coverage and discredit and devalue facts from the news division. It's the Phil Jackson theory of politics.

Via slinkerwink, I'm sure the right sees the juxtaposition of these two photos as an example of this bias:





But what never gets mentioned is the substance of the two campaigns that are being run - Obama's is sharp while McCain's is slow. Obama is straightforward while McCain is cloying. Obama is sunny while McCain is negative. Why WOULDN'T they be treated differently?