I Just Can’t Take CNN Anymore
I tried watching it again today, this time podcasts, two or three different shows, and I just couldn’t take it. It was just one hit job on Obama after another, one set of headlines giving better coverage to McCain after another. When it got to the point where the reporters on Cooper’s 360 show were trying to show Obama as a corrupt, cutthroat Chicago ballbuster and they used his line of “nobody questions my patriotism” as an example of “nothing illegal,” but showcasing his “brass knuckles politics”… I just got ill listening to it. The tissue-thin connections and blatantly politicized innuendo could easily have been written by the McCain campaign.
The more I watch the U.S. political news media, the less I wonder why John McCain is keeping up or even gaining in the polls.
This is why I think Obama is sleeping on the job. He’s lost his mojo.
He has to use media buys to shame the media into telling the truth. If he puts up real facts in his ads, then they can’t journalistically push trash. It works like this, the trash they push is X, Obama’s ad says Y. The viewer sees X & Y, and so CNN or whoever has to sort it out. They’ll say, well really x is wrong and y is the truth, and then move on.
Obama was nuts to go on Vacation. He was wrong to move to the center. His polls peaked before he moved to the center. He’s wrong to not allow surrogates to go after McCain in order to define him. He’s going down Kerry, Gore and Dukakis road – pulling punches to avoid offending people who would never vote for him. It appears to me as if Obama is like the Manchurian candidate for Republicans. Obama’s lost his mojo.
In the meantime McCain is defining McCain and Obama. The media is reinforcing and soon all the add buys and all the kings men and all of our money won’t put Obama back together again.
I find this really frustrating to watch. Recently I’ve seen people compare Obama to Adlai Stephenson. That is starting to resonate. Maybe he’ll get his mojo back. Maybe his ground game will work, maybe people are starting to realize that we have no future if the Republicans get re-elected – but I’ve lost faith with the American people. I read the paper every day. There very stupid. If Obama loses this election this country is going down the tubes – so to paraphrase Churchill, he should so bare himself so that people will look back at his campaign and say this was his finest hour, not the hour he became a punching bag for a 71 year old man that can’t find his way out of a toilet stall.
Again, this is during the month of August when everyone is thinking of everything but politics, it’s before the VP announcements, it’s before the conventions, it’s before people start to really take notice and pay attention. And McCain’s campaign hasn’t broken 45% all year.
I’d say it’s nearly inevitible that McCain may have a small, short-lived LEAD in the polls after the Republican convention. It’ll end up being meaningless. The GOP is in the worst shape it’s been in decades, and the sinking economy isn’t helping. The Democratic congress will have a banner year, and Obama will be a part of it. If it doesn’t seem that way, then you’re not tuning out all the media hysteria going on now.
Hell, I’ll bet if I had anything to bet with.
Steve: I know, but the problem is that if the media won’t cover any of this in context, if the major news channels continue to cast Obama in an unfairly negative light, if they continue to ignore and cover up his gaffes and give him a break on most of his crap, then how will that change after the conventions? We just cannot depend on the media to abandon it’s noticeable right-wing bias at all this year.
I just posted on what Obama should do to turn this around. Other people are saying the same kind of thing, and people are talking about how Obama is saving up for after the conventions, and then he’ll get tough, by golly. The problem with such predictions is that they are almost always pipe dreams that don’t materialize.