libermain was shot down as a potential candidate by his advisers and then romney was the other choice and they did some polling and found out that large amounts of the conservative base wouldn't vote for romney because he is 1. a mormon and they don't consider that part of the christian faith and 2. they can't trust his positions on things such as abortion and gay marriage.

its their own bigotry that is going to get in the way of them actually winning this election. if romney had been on the ticket during this whole financial crisis mccain would have lost no ground there.

serves them right.

10/31/2008 1:06:59 PM

Quote :

"DNL: pretty sure lieberman woulda accepted had john mccain picked him"

pretty sure you're wrong




[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 4:24 PM. Reason : ]

11/1/2008 4:16:16 PM

Quote :

"But to say its been horribly run is bullshit. And you probably believe that b/c the media pounds it into your head 24/7. "

It's been horribly run, and I haven't heard the media say that.

Of course, I haven't had a TV since July, either.

...and maybe the media, as a very general whole, leans a little to the left, but that's not what destroyed the McCain campaign. That was absolutely self-inflicted.

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 4:44 PM. Reason : ^^ just as a side note, Mormons are not Christians. They are...well, Mormons.]

11/1/2008 4:43:49 PM

Why should the media keep unbiased coverage of the McCain campaign? All McCain has done in the last four weeks is change from one negative attack to another in the prayer that one of those would stick.

Experience
Bill Ayers
Socialism
Wealth Redistribution

None of these really resonate with a public facing a recession and a government that essentially nationalized its own financial institutions. Nor does this help McCain differentiate himself from Bush when he's running the same fear campaigning as we saw in 2000 and 2004: vote for me because the other guy will cause communism and armageddon. I also want to point out that the McCain camp chose Sarah Palin specifically to garner attention, and media focus, and thats backfired on them magnificently because she's done exactly that, but not as a legitimate conservative, but as a clown shoes side act.

McCain could have beat Obama (not that he's going to lose next week, he may win) being McCain, instead he tried to beat Obama being something else..and what that else is none of us have quite figured out and our inability to relate to that translated directly to his trailing in the polls.

11/1/2008 5:11:25 PM

why should the media be allowed to be a free campaigner for one side or the other? The media was never meant to be a tool for one party or the other. It was meant to be a check on all parties.

11/1/2008 5:57:22 PM

people want to feel informed and educate themselves the easiest way possible

they dont realize they are having biased literature delivered daily to their front door (and on tv; this includes fox news)


some people can read through the garbage, but most are blinded by bold headlines and manipulative articles written atop the journalist's soap box

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 6:27 PM. Reason : and the constitution allows it to happen]

11/1/2008 6:26:06 PM

Quote :

" just as a side note, Mormons are not Christians"

That is debatable.

They believe in Jesus as the son of God, which is what a Christian is.

11/1/2008 6:33:26 PM

^

but they aint real Christians. They belong to the fake Christianity, along w/ the rest of Fake-America

11/1/2008 6:37:19 PM

Quote :

"and the constitution allows it to happen"

11/1/2008 6:38:52 PM

so the constitution doesnt allow freedom of press?

or was i mistaken

lovely pictures, but what are you getting at and does it relate to this .. quite obscure

11/1/2008 6:56:16 PM

So are the conservatives in this thread wanting a mandate on what the media should deliver or what.

I mean for all of you that love free market economics, the free market clearly wants biased reporting.

Whether that was Fox news dominating everyone else with its pro bush agenda the last 8 years, or huffington post type reporting dominating CNN and the like now.

11/1/2008 7:01:28 PM

The media is not remotely as biased as the McCain camp is making them out to be.

11/1/2008 7:06:57 PM

Its determined by the free market though!

If america demands its news be biased, who are we to question it?

11/1/2008 7:08:23 PM

Quote :

"The media is not remotely as biased as the McCain camp is making them out to be."

thats an absolute joke

11/1/2008 7:10:02 PM

Thank you for that factual retort sir.

11/1/2008 7:10:43 PM

sorry, the media is conservative, what was i thinking

11/1/2008 7:11:44 PM

Sarcasm is a poor substitute for logic, my friend.

11/1/2008 7:13:14 PM

logic is too "learny" for conservatives.

11/1/2008 7:13:42 PM

if you read the news, watch the news, or listen to the news, my point has already been made

11/1/2008 7:14:25 PM

Oh what ever dude, even your own National Review is questioning the McCain campaign for its terrible effort this year.

11/1/2008 7:17:28 PM

why not?

ive already said that the mccain campaign deserves to be questioned

but so does the obama campaign

so if the national review, which you criticize so strongly, can write an article questioning mccain's political moves .. a liberal media venue could do the same ... unless they feel hes the messiah or something and is incapable of being wrong

11/1/2008 7:23:48 PM

for certain, the media has been ridiculously in favour of Obama. They've made no attempt to hide it. Hell, SNL has been a running Obama advertisement for the past two months. But, the media isn't the sole reason McCain is losing. Picking a VP that didn't suck would have helped, for one. Actually having a coherent message would have been another. And finally, attacking Obama's only message of "BUSH IS EVIL!!!" would have been a death blow to the media darling

11/1/2008 7:25:24 PM

^^ uhh how can they question the Obama campaign for its "terrible effort" when their campaign has been run extremely well?

^ SNL got lucky that Tina Fey and Palin are so similar. It's for that reason alone they can make fun of her. If Obama had chosen someone that looked like their cast, they would making fun of them too.

Quote :

"And finally, attacking Obama's only message of "BUSH IS EVIL!!!" would have been a death blow to the media darling"

This is where McCain REALLY shot himself in the foot, I think. He had to literally embrace Bush to gain the republican nomination, and it would have been hard for him to go back on this after the nom. He could have had a better chance maybe to just take his medicine, but it would give Obama a LOT of good sound bites of McCain wooing the Bush-conservatives during the primary to play.

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 7:36 PM. Reason : ]

11/1/2008 7:33:01 PM

I didn't criticize the National Review, actually, Tke. In fact if you're going to make that claim I'm asking you right now to justify exactly how what I wrote can be taken as me being critical of that outlet.

Politico's response to this furor is the most spot on, trying to equally criticize the Obama campaign in the name of being unbiased is plain stupid when that campaign is much better run, and in fact, is being hailed currently as one of the best run campaigns in modern American politics. If Obama wins on tuesday, it will be a text book case for both Democratic and Republican strategists for years to come.

Not to mention, every news outlet publishes McCain's new message of the day in which he tries a new topic to attack Obama, but most people at this point ignore it because if its lack of substance.

11/1/2008 7:34:13 PM

^^ no. SNL has been nailing McCain pretty hard too. Hell, they did a skit last week where the whole skit was Bush saying McCain was the same as him. Sound familiar? The SNL slobberjob has been about far more than just Sarah Palin, and you know it.

^ I don't think it's all that hard to run an effective campaign when you have 10 times the money of your competitor and can buy up a 30-minute timeslot on every major network DURING THE WORLD SERIES.

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 7:37 PM. Reason : ]

11/1/2008 7:36:18 PM

^ I don't watch SNL, and my only knowledge is from the clips that go viral and get posted everywhere.

11/1/2008 7:37:05 PM

Quote :

"uhh how can they question the Obama campaign for its "terrible effort" when their campaign has been run extremely well"

how can you not run a successful campaign when you have every media hot shot, from all venues, bow down and lick your balls everyday????


thats absurd .. if you think obama is perfect, flawless, and incapable of having downfalls ... then youve soaked up the propaganda quite well .. there are two sides to every issue, and youve been influenced easily by one

11/1/2008 7:43:41 PM

not to mention you've been influenced by an utter lack of exposure to any amount of the other side. Or, more aptly, by utter suppression of the other side.

11/1/2008 7:45:03 PM

Now you both are begging the question and trying to string together facts to support your answer.

If the Media is so incredibly biased then how did George W. Bush pull off successive victories in 2000 and 2004? Especially 2004, as that year was a year where the media was heavily criticized for favoring a war without questioning government.

Furthermore, why are conservative outlets like NRO as well as the RNC not successful in stringing together a solid anti Obama message that doesn't change every single day

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 7:51 PM. Reason : >.<]

11/1/2008 7:49:43 PM

bush had a 82% approval rating


next?


umm, NRO is minuscule compared to the NY times, the NY post, chicago tribune, msnbc, ect ect

[Edited on November 1, 2008 at 7:53 PM. Reason : ]

11/1/2008 7:51:26 PM

No, actually, he didn't.

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm

11/1/2008 7:52:14 PM

Quote :

"If the Media is so incredibly biased then how did George W. Bush pull off successive victories in 2000 and 2004? Especially 2004, as that year was a year where the media was heavily criticized for favoring a war without questioning government."

because of big bad Karl Rove, of course! didn't you know? Might it be that Kerry was just such a piss poor candidate? And this year, we have exactly the same situation: two extremely shitty candidates. One, however, can wail unabated against a not-running incumbent.

Quote :

"Furthermore, why are conservative outlets like NRO as well as the RNC not successful in stringing together a solid anti Obama message that doesn't change every single day"

Maybe it's cause their figure-head is so inept? you know, like I've been saying...

11/1/2008 7:56:16 PM

the media was decidedly conservative until about 2006 when the Iraq war started to look really bad, since then it's moved back to the center, in my estimation, but is no where near as bad as McCain is saying.

Just look at this whole Obama's step-aunt thing. Why is this getting so much attention, while McCain's crazy brother who called 911 to complain about traffic is practically ignored?

2 essentially meaningless relations to the candidates, but the more distant one gets more attention.

11/1/2008 8:00:37 PM

Yes aaron, you sarcastically pointed out that the RNC post Rove is a wreck and thats contributing to the train wreck of a McCain campaign but you've failed to link McCain's failures directly to media coverage of McCain.

Its a classic chicken and egg-

Is the media focus on McCain negative because his campaign sucks or does his campaign suck because media focus on him is negative. Given that Rove and the RNC mastered the media in 2000 and 2004, I'm going to go with McCain being the reason McCain is sucking right now.

11/1/2008 8:03:10 PM

I never claimed that McCain's failure is due solely to the media. In fact, I posited precisely the opposite. Nice strawman, buddy

11/1/2008 8:18:16 PM

McCain has run the worst campaign in living memory, in the entire history of televised campaigning since 1960.

McCain's campaign -- from the top to the bottom -- has been thoroughly drowned in complete and total incompetence

this is not opinion. this is fact. and history is going to be a very harsh judge on both GWB and John McCain as being the instruments of the GOP's downfall.

in the course of 8 increasingly disastrous years and culminating with this train-wreck of a campaign during a critical national election ... The Republican Party has completely LOST AN ENTIRE GENERATION

11/1/2008 9:52:28 PM

I fear you may be right. And Obama will end up being the downfall of the entire nation.

11/2/2008 12:04:21 AM

If elected I think Obama will wind up be a far less radical President than either his biggest supporters or detractrators believe.

My primary hope is that he brings empiricism to the US government. He and Plouffe talked about doing that to the campaign and they really seem to have hit it out of the park.

I have seen him give interviews on economics that sounded like he was paraphrasing Greg Mankiw's Princples of Economics. For example, when talking about infrastructure he didn't say

"government needs to rebuild this country"

or

"government needs to take care of its people"

he said

"There are certain cases where there are public goods which are hard to finance through the free market"


I don't think he was pandering the Economist vote. I think he has Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee in is ear for 2 years and is willing to look at the data.


Furman by the way is the guy who argued in Slate that Wal-Mart is good for America.

11/2/2008 10:46:18 AM

is that like Eleanor Clift arguing that the "wal-mart women" demographic is good for McCain's campaign?

11/3/2008 10:27:31 PM