September 08, 2008

9/8: Game-Changer

The political blogosphere still can't get enough of Sarah Palin. Conservative bloggers are rejoicing over Palin's presence on the ticket and buzzing about John McCain's rising poll numbers. Liberal bloggers, on the other hand, can't seem to get a handle on the Palin phenomenon. Several bloggers are emphasizing that Palin is "a formidable opponent" whom "we must take seriously", while others are arguing that the liberal blogosphere "is taking her too seriously" and that it needs to focus more on McCain. And to the extent that the netroots are focusing on Palin, they've yet to settle on a single line of attack. Last week liberal bloggers were focusing on Palin's ties to the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party; now they're focusing on the Troopergate scandal. Will either of these attacks gain any traction in the media?

PALIN: How To Deal With Her?

Liberal bloggers are debating how to deal with the Sarah Palin phenonmenon. Several liberal bloggers are urging their readers not to underestimate Palin:

• Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher: "With a 58% favorability rating, she's also now more popular than [Barack] Obama or McCain (both at 57%) and [Joe] Biden (48%). I stand by my assertion that anyone who watched her speech and concluded that she would not be a formidable opponent is engaging in wishful thinking."
• Open Left's Matt Stoller: "When Palin came on, I saw an incredibly charming and hilarious performer, who expressed a secure sense of mockery towards Democratic leaders and a down home sense of self. She's obviously an alpha girl in the mean girl high school sense, but she's also extraordinarily bright and grounded in a conservative view of the world. She's tough and accomplished and that can't be denied. [...] She's a strong politician we must take seriously, or else she's going to be our President."
• Firedoglake's Jo Fish: "Palin is a formidable adversary who plays for keeps. [...] It would be a mistake of epic proportions to underestimate her for a nanosecond or to write her off as a classic doctrinaire wingnut."

Open Left's Chris Bowers responds: "These statements bother me a bit, for two reasons. First, I don't know who isn't taking Palin seriously in the progressive blogosphere. Second, I'm not sure what taking Palin more seriously would entail, exactly. Maybe people don't like her in the progressive blogosphere, but everyone seems to be taking her seriously. For nine consecutive days, according to Technorati, there have been more blog posts with the tag 'Sarah Palin' than there have been with the tag 'John McCain'. By contrast, according to Google News, during that same time period there have 2.5 times as many news stories that mention 'John McCain' than there have that mention 'Sarah Palin'. While the blogosphere has been consistently more focused on Palin than on McCain, the broader news media remains more fixed on McCain than on Palin. If anything, the blogosphere is completely obsessed with Palin, and is taking her too seriously."

Bowers continues: "There has never been solid evidence that Vice-Presidential picks have swayed many voters, and from the numbers I listed here I'm not seeing much evidence this time around, either. McCain's favorables have been rising for 12 months, and they might really be spiking now. [...] For the majority of this decade, polling regularly confirmed that John McCain was the most popular politician in America. When considering our strategy in this election that is something we must never forget. As such, we need to be doing more to push McCain's still very high favorable rating back down. I don't think continual Palin obsession will accomplish that goal. Let's get back to hitting McCain."

Stoller doesn't think it matters much whether the netroots focus on McCain or Palin: "Chris thinks 'we' should take McCain seriously versus Palin. I agree, as McCain in at least one poll is leading by 10 points among likely voters (probably an outlier but not a happy one). I think McCain's going to die fairly soon, (why else would they hide his medical records) and if McCain wins we'll be dealing with a President Palin and a soon-to-be thoroughly devastated country (picture a 7-2 majority of [Samuel] Alito-style judges on SCOTUS for starters). My problem is the adjective 'we'. What me, Jane Hamsher, Chris Bowers, or any aggregation of lots of grasstops says doesn't matter compared to Joe Biden's sickening praise of John McCain. [...] We are just outside observers who can volunteer and do GOTV work and occasionally push something into the mainstream (as the netroots did with McCain's housing gaffe). But as with the housing gaffe, when the campaign decides to drop it, there is no going back. It's all up to them."

PALIN II: Should Dems Ignore Her And Focus On McCain?

Many liberal bloggers are echoing Bowers' argument that Dems should focus less on Palin and more on McCain:

• TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat: "Clearly, McCain/Palin is not being perceived as [George W.] Bush's Third Term. Too much Troopergate, too much Palin. Not enough Bush. [...] Let's get back to McCain and how he represents more of the same."
• The Huffington Post's Benjamin R. Barber: "It is not really Palin but McCain who is the perpetrator we need to criticize. It is McCain who cynically chose a far right wing ideologue who shares the worst biases of the current administration in Washington and made her his running mate in a 'campaign against Washington.' In other words, it is not the pit-bull in lipstick but the man who unleashed her who bears the responsibility."

Open Left's Glenn W. Smith thinks Dems should focus on McCain and Palin: "One side says too much about Palin distracts from McSame and our awful economic, social, ethical and political circumstances. The other says we can't overdo the attention on Palin, because when she implodes, McCain's judgment implodes with her, and besides, she's going to bring over just enough votes in certain swing states that she matters, even if she's wounded with the larger American public. As some here have noted, we can and should do both. [...] The outrageous lies about [Palin's] attitude toward taxpayer money (spend all she can hope her DC lobbyists can get, then lie about it), her abuses of office for personal vendettas, her extremist policy views on women's health and almost every other issue, her total lack of experience, all these things deserve our daily attention. We can't let up. [...] Biden should carry the attack. And he should be forceful. We should be there with him. Obama should focus exclusively on McCain. [...] We make a mistake when we forget we can and must do several things at once. This is one of those times. If we fail at any of them -- making Palin unacceptable, making McCain Bush III, advancing our own character and solutions to our nation's sad circumstances -- we won't win."

PALIN III: It's Time To Face The Music, Governor!

Liberal bloggers spent much of this past weekend criticizing the McCain camp for refusing to allow Palin to do any interviews "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference":

• Daily Kos' Hunter: "So Sarah Palin will, according to McCain, be ready to take over the Presidency at a moment's notice, and can go toe to toe with [Vladimir] Putin whenever the need arise -- but she's not quite ready to take on the horror of, say, The View."
• TPM's Josh Marshall: "Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it's true. And yet today she's so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can't even give a softball interview. That's really all we need to know. Yes, she's off being prepped at some undisclosed location. And I've little doubt that by the time her debate rolls around she'll be sufficiently pumped full of slogans and bromides to make a show of it. But now, this moment, is the one that tells us all we need to know."
• The Nation's Ari Melber: "Sarah Palin is an able liar, as her acceptance speech showed. She may be a coward, too, at least when it comes to facing down the reporters she blasted from the comfort of that solitary podium in St. Paul."
• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "Palin is going to hide for two weeks because she's not ready. [...] But rest assured, in two short weeks, magically, Sarah Pumpkin will become Sarah Vice President."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "The McCain campaign is scared to death. They knew nothing about Palin before they announced her, they relied on a cursory vetting process that has turned out to be shot full of holes, they realize now that she has no settled views on any issue of national importance and could blurt out anything at any time, and they're terrified about what might crop up next. So they're keeping her in the deep freeze. Will it work? I guess it's possible. If she does one or two friendly interviews it will prevent reporters from saying flatly that she 'refuses to meet with the press,' and the slightly more complicated explanation may be just complicated enough to keep voters from noticing what's going on."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald made a prescient prediction that Palin's first interviewer might be ABC's Charlie Gibson: "When they decide in a couple of weeks that Palin is ready to do so, she'll go and sit down with Brit Hume or Larry King or Charlie Gibson or some other pleasant, accommodating person who plays a journalist on TV and have a nice, amiable, entertaining chat about topics that are easily anticipated. Having been preceded by all sorts of campaign drama about her first interview and the excitement that she's not up to the task, her TV appearance will be widely touted, score big ratings, and will be nice entertainment for the network that presents it. [...] The ideological extremism and growing ethical questions that define Sarah Palin -- and especially the discredited, rejected core beliefs of John McCain -- means that the McCain campaign should have much to worry about in this election. Having Sarah Palin face the mighty, scary American press corps certainly isn't one of them. That's just a melodramatic distraction, one that will redound to the GOP's benefit. Palin will 'face' our media soon enough, and it will probably be the easiest thing she'll have to do between now and November."

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan: "[Geraldine] Ferraro was being interviewed within four days of being announced. Dan Quayle gave an interview one day after being selected. We are now on Day Nine for Palin and are told to expect another thirteen before she's ready. This is a pitbull with lipstick? More like a cowering chihuahua."

PALIN IV: Who's Ready To Play Softball?

Once it was reported that ABC's Charles Gibson had landed the first Palin interview, liberal bloggers reacted with scorn, as most of them have little regard for Gibson:

• Firedoglake's Attaturk: "I guess if you cannot do FoxNews you might as well do Charles Gibson. [...] Maybe Charley and Palin can talk about how $200,000 a year is a typical-middle class income? Maybe he'll ask questions about her patriotism? Maybe he'll dwell on all the gossip? And I hope she passes that baby around in a flag-draped diaper or he'll have a fit. Aw, Who am I kidding? -- it's going to be softballs and soft-lighting. [...] The McCain Campaign itself proclaimed no press interviews with Palin until the press were deferential enough. And nobody is more deferential to Right-Wing talking points than Charles Gibson."
• Greenwald: "If I were a McCain adviser and wanted to have Palin sit with someone who is perceived as a 'journalist' while knowing that no damage could possibly occur, I'd pick Charlie Gibson, too. There are many, many other equally good alternatives, but when it comes to wretched passivity and sycophantic establishment worship, the former 'Good Morning America' host -- whose career was built on oozing amiability and inoffensiveness -- is as good as it gets."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "It just so happens that only one network journalist got an exclusive sit-down interview with John McCain during the Republican convention, and that too was ABC's John Gibson. McCain appeared to enjoy the discussion -- he claimed that Palin opposed earmarks, Palin's physical proximity to Russia amounts to foreign-policy experience, Obama believes Iran is a 'tiny problem', and one of Palin's 'primary responsibilities' as governor is 'national security.' All of these claims are demonstrably false, but Gibson didn't challenge McCain on any of them. It's not too big a surprise, then, that Gibson will be rewarded for his deference. [...] Gibson no doubt knows the McCain campaign punishes networks that ask forceful and substantive questions, and he probably doesn't want to lose his shot at the first exclusive sit-down with Todd Palin."

Marshall is unhappy with the format of the interview -- specifically, the fact that "Palin will sit down for multiple interviews with Gibson in Alaska over two days": "Political interviews are never done like this. Because it makes the questioning entirely at the discretion of the person being interviewed and their handlers. The interviewer has to be on their best behavior, at least until the last of the 'multiple interviews' because otherwise the subsequent sittings just won't happen. For a political journalist to agree to such terms amounts to a form of self-gelding. The only interviews that are done this way are lifestyle and celebrity interviews. And it's pretty clear that that is what this will be."

PALIN V: Obstructing Justice?

Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the McCain camp's efforts "to derail a politically charged investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of her public safety commissioner". They're also buzzing about reports that "seven key witnesses" have just changed their minds about cooperating with the Troopergate investigation:

• Drum: "Is the McCain campaign scared to death that there might be more to Troopergate than Sarah Palin fessed up to during the ten or fifteen minutes of vetting they gave her last week? Oh my yes. And they're in full whirlwind mode trying to shut down the bipartisan investigation into her activities that's been underway in Alaska for the past couple of months -- an investigation that Palin had earlier said she welcomed and would fully cooperate with because, you know, she had nothing to hide etc. etc. Anyway, that's no longer operative. She's now got a lawyer, her husband has a lawyer, they've managed to get seven witnesses to refuse to testify, they've filed a motion of their own to gum up the works, and they've gotten their allies in the legislature to call for the investigation to be shut down. (It had gotten too 'politicized' they said hilariously, after doing everything in their power to politicize it.)"
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "What D.C. based investigative reporters like Michael Isikoff know is that where there is smoke, there is fire. By working so hard to stonewall the troopergate investigation, the McCain/Palin crew is actually broadcasting that there is something to be found. Their hope is that nothing is found til after election day. Instead, what they are doing is putting this story front and center every day."
• Firedoglake's Eli: "Okay, stop me if you've heard this before: High-ranking government official abuses their power to put a dedicated public servant out of a job, then hides behind the stone wall of omerta to ride out the subsequent investigation. Yes, that would be Sarah Palin, totally justifying John McCain's faith in her ability to be an effective Republican vice president."
• Marshall: "Within days of Palin's selection, at least seven of her aides and associates, who had previously agreed to cooperate with the trooper-gate investigation, informed investigator Steve Branchflower that they were now no longer willing to be deposed. Note too that this was immediately after the McCain team deployed what George Stephanopoulos reported was a 'rapid response team of about ten operatives that includes lawyers' to the state. So the question is: what contact did representatives of the McCain campaign have with these aides that had agreed to testify but within days of [Palin's] selection took back their pledge and are now refusing to cooperate?"
• Open Left's Paul Rosenberg: "In the immediate aftermath of the GOP convention, the Troopergate scandal has clearly emerged as VP candidate Sarah Palin's Achilles heel, with a ferocious, Nixonian combination of lies, stonewalling, and, of course, attacks on her 'enemies' in the media."

OBAMA: Waiting For Gutman

After Howard Gutman, a member of Obama's nat'l finance committee, "very directly criticized the parenting of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin", conservative bloggers are complaining that the Obama camp isn't doing enough to control its surrogates:

• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "[There is] no sign that Gutman has departed the Obama campaign. In fact, we're getting a rerun of something we saw earlier this year. Whenever we saw an Obama surrogate -- say, Wes Clark, George McGovern, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, Democratic congressional candidate Bill Gillespie, Ed Schultz or Tony McPeak -- attacking John McCain's war record, the response was always the same -- a short, curt, pro forma 'we disapprove' statement from a spokesman, with no real consequences for the surrogate who stepped out of line."
• TheNextRight's Soren Dayton: "Regarding the recent statements by Howard Gutman, making the kinds of attacks that Barack Obama has personally disavowed, Obama broke his word. Typically, there has been no consequences. [...] We really have to start pressuring this guy to keep his word on this stuff. There is something profoundly fraudulent about his claims of a new kind of politics, pre-emptively denouncing this stuff, and then doing nothing when it acually happens. In the case of Gutman, the appropriate response is clear. Minimally, he should remove Gutman from the Finance Committee and from any formal role in the campaign. If he were serious about any of this, he would give back some or all of Gutman's money. But Obama isn't serious about his commitments. So it won't happen."
• RedState's Moe Lane: "It's kind of disingenuous for Obama to complain about being linked to the Palin smears when it's his own finance people that are participating in them."

Hot Air's Allahpundit: "[Is it] fair to call him a 'top' supporter? Given the fact that he's a member of The One's national finance committee and advertises that fact in his HuffPo bio, I'm going with 'yes.' [...] Does the left really want to play a game of 'children ruined by absentee political parents'? Because I know just the place to start."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The Shy Tory Factor

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver suggests a possible reason for McCain's sizeable post-convention bounce:

"While the most recent round of polls may be overshooting the mark, I am also reminded of something called the Shy Tory Factor, a phenomenon observed in the early 1990s in British elections in which conservative voters (Tories) had tended to be underrepresented in pre-election polling, perhaps owing to response bias. It seems plausible to me that some segment of conservative Republican voters had effectively been in hiding from the pollsters, either embarrassed by the performance of George W. Bush (and therefore disengaged from politics), or embarrassed to disclose to pollsters that they support him. Suddenly, with the selection of Palin, there has been a jolt of energy within this group, a release of pent-up frustrations, and they are coming out of the woodwork. If this is the case, then perhaps the partisan composition of the electorate had never shifted as much from 2004 as it has appeared to; rather, the conservatives were either reluctant to identify themselves as Republican, or reluctant to take a pollster's calls in the first place.

This is just a theory, and by no means necessarily the most likely explanation for the recent shift in the polling. On the contrary, I sense that the McCain bounce is more broad than it is deep, and will probably dissipate to some degree in the near future. At the same time, I'm not sure that the +10's and +12's the Democrats had been pulling in partisan ID advantage weren't in part an artifact of polling methodology, and more a reflection of shifts in enthusiasm than actual changes in ideology."

LEST WE FORGET: Another McSweeney's List

McSweeney's Benjamin Sarlin makes a list of "Planned Sequels to Nicolas Cage's Upcoming Film Bangkok Dangerous":

• Cape Town Dangerous-er
• Moscow Depressing
• Tbilisi Unpronounceable
• Miami Leathery
• Tokyo Crowded
• Boston Unable to Conceal Inferiority Complex Over New York
• London Expensive
• Los Angeles Nice to Visit but You Wouldn't Really Want to Live There
• Newark Unpleasant
• Baghdad Just Ridiculously Dangerous
• Nicolas Cage Unwatchable Shell of Former Self

Posted by Ian Faerstein at September 8, 2008 01:41 PM