Irresponsible Media is Responsible for McCain’s Poor Campaign (If It is Poor)
7October 28, 2008 by Tyson Wynn
The folks at the Politico have responded to charges of bias toward Obama by saying it’s not their fault, McCain has just run a bad campaign. It struck me that McCain is of the media’s own making.
John McCain is the Republican nominee this year as a direct result of years and years of the media’s love affair with the “maverick,” John McCain. The media, in fact, are the ones who came up with the maverick moniker I am so sick of hearing. The Republican-hating media has, for years, held McCain up as the consummate example of the bipartisanship needed in a politician, and indeed the president. Then, when he’s able to miraculously secure the Republican nomination, this self-same media drops him like yesterday’s egg salad. Why? To gush all over the moderate, bipartisan beacon of experience, Barack Obama. And to add insult to injury, the media who made McCain’s maverick brand, now begin to destroy him, bit by bit. Sarah may be called the barracuda, but members of most media outlets are piranha.
And they find that John McCain is easy prey because he’s never had to deal with a hostile media before. In its creation of the McCain super-politician, the media – in worshiping its subject – encouraged a persona that is not used to having to handle a hostile, angry, even hysterical media.
What it boils down to is this: if the media had stopped lauding John McCain long enough to do its job properly, McCain might never have been our nominee, or having been our nominee, he’d have developed better skills for dealing with the media. I know I am going out on a limb here expecting real objectivity from the media, but I’m am idealist. And don’t mistake me here; I know there’s no way to ever expect a media complex that does not attempt to utterly destroy anyone to the right of, well, Barack Obama.
When the media complain about John McCain, just remember: they wanted him in this position. And also remember, Barack Obama is now enjoying the media’s sloppy journalism based in love and adoration that John McCain once experienced. And just as they are now experiencing disappointment with McCain, we will all soon experience great consernation with a President Obama if the worst happens next Tuesday. Better to stumble during a campaign than in an administration.
Category Barack Obama, John McCain, My 2¢, Politics | Tags:
7 comments
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Tyson, strictly speaking it’s not true that McCain has never faced a hostile media before. During the Keating Five scandal — before the “McCain the Maverick” meme really took deep root — the media was quite hostile. However, McCain’s decision to go before the media and answer all their questions gradually won the media over. The other four senators involved listened to their lawyers and stonewalled, which effectively ended their careers (all but Sen. Glen, who survived, but whose credibility was so badly damaged that he was a “dead politician walking” for the last several years of his senate career).
I do, however, get your broader point, and I would admonish citizens of all ideological stripes to look with a skeptical eye to all politicians. They all have enormous temptations put before them, and it takes a person with great self-discipline to resist the temptations of power. Personally, I hope that whoever wins will have the temperament and prudence to make decisions that will work to the benefit of America as a whole, while recognizing that the working of government is inevitably a function of distributing goods.
It also helped that McCain was exonerated in the Keating Five scandal investigation.
What I’d really like for you you to elaborate on is your concluding statement, “the working of government is inevitably a function of distributing goods.”
Irresponsible “Americans” are responsible for irresponsible media.
I would agree that, since the Senate was controlled by Democrats, McCain was less directly culpable, although he enjoyed a personal relationship with Keating that the others did not. I don’t say that to imply guilt by association, but merely to observe that in politics mere association (think Bill Ayers) can be enough to seriously damage or even destroy a politician’s reputation.
I’ll try in the limited time I have for blogging to elaborate on the “redistribution” issue.
Governments have always played a role in facilitating a healthy economy. Governments coin money, they build infrastructure, and they regulate markets, among myriad other activities. More than that, governments provide for defense, subsidize education (thank God, from my perspective), and facilitate attempts to keep its citizens healthy with subsidies for vaccinations and other forms of “interventions” designed to protect vulnerable segments of the population (esp. children and the elderly)from disease.
These are interventions that nearly every mainstream economist (and few mainstream economists are Marxists, most are pro-business, and hence not as a rule guilty of “liberal academic bias”)thinks can be justified whenever the benefits outweigh the costs. In each case, they involve some form of “distribution” in the sense that tax dollars are taken at a differntial rate from citizens, and some citizens benefit disproportionately from those policies. In my view, if building a highway or educating a segment of the populace creates a net plus from an economic or societal perspective, that’s a good thing to which citizens and policy makers should at least consider.
Likewise, I acknowledge the argument for fiscal restraint, but then the GOP has kind of ceded the field on fiscal restraint over the past couple of years, have they not?
As for his association with Keating, McCain most decidedly did not keep it up after he discovered what he was…
You are hitting on most conservatives’ number one complaint with the Bush administration. Fiscal restraint has all but disappeared. Bush finds himself hated by liberals because they view him as a war-mongering right-winger. Conservatives are disappointed in him because he’s a big-spending, big-government Republican. It leaves him somewhere in the middle where 20% of the people like him (as opposed to the 12% who like Congress). It is stupid, though, for those disappointed with Bush’s lack of fiscal restraint to jump ship to The Redistributor because he doesn’t solve that fiscal problem.
I would say rather than ceding the issue, the issue has been thoroughly abandoned by both parties, and one of them had better wake up. If my party loses this year, they need to accept the fact that it is because they did not govern as conservatives when they had the opportunity.
I’m not thrilled with my options. McCain will get my vote because I view him as the least harmful. But, frankly, if an old pair of Reagan’s socks were on the ballot, they’d beat both these folks out for my vote.
And, I still stand by my original post, this is a problem of the media’s making, and as a party, we’d better come up with a better system of choosing the best nominee. Issue one should be instant run-off voting.
The media does exert a great deal of “gatekeeping” influence, to the extent that some might declare them king or Queenmakers. As one scholar whose text I use in one of my classes asks, “Who elected them” to their positions of exalted political importance?
I’m not certain that run-off nomination primaries would result in stronger candidates. Frankly, part of the great problem with American democracy is that people too often feel that the two-party system fails to produce meaningful choices, or at least a choice that a signficant portion of the American public dislikes. In any event, attempts to reform the system to produce a greater range of choices would need to be fundamental, and may not produce the kind of politics you would like (though they may be more to my liking).
I am absolutely certain that instant run-off voting would produce better candidates – and candidates who reflect the ideology and have the support of their party’s base. There’s a reason McCain’s campaign came alive when he picked Palin: she’s closer in ideology to most of McCain’s primary opponents. For most genuine conservatives, McCain was near the bottom of our list. That said, the bottom of our list is still miles above the liberal candidates.
Michael Bates turned me on to instant run off voting, and it makes more sense than anything I have heard in a long time. Check out batesline.com and do a search.