Media believes McCain is ‘often uncomfortable with his own campaign’

August 5, 2008

The more offensive John McCain becomes as a candidate, the more leading media personalities will come up with rationalizations to defend his bizarre conduct. It’s like being graded on a very generous curve.

This segment on MSNBC’s “Hardball” yesterday was a classic example.

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who did an exceptional job last week of debunking McCain’s bogus smear of Obama over not visiting wounded U.S. troops in Germany, argued, “John McCain also doesn’t like this kind of politics, went along with his new, tougher political advisors…. I think he’s inside a bubble…. I think he’s been ginned up a little bit.”

The Politico’s Roger Simon agreed. “McCain really doesn’t like attacking…which is why I think he’s often uncomfortable with his own campaign,” Simon insisted. “The Britney-and-Paris ad, I think, will go down in history as one of the most visually incoherent ads ever shown on TV.”

Mike Barnicle, filling in for Chris Matthews, added, “It also, I would think, gets to his, something that he’s very proud of, has been very proud of and it’s been clear in talking to him over the years, his sense of honor. I think an ad like that offended, or would offend if he paid attention to it, his sense of honor.”

Mitchell agreed. “I think he may have been misled about what Obama did or did not say,” she said, adding, “As the candidate, there’s no way he could be tracking all of this himself.”

This is sheer madness. Worse, it’s not even a compelling defense.

To hear Mitchell, Simon, and Barnicle tell it, McCain’s relentlessly negative campaign isn’t his fault, so let’s not be too hard on him.

As Josh Marshall put it:

Truly a Kuhnian moment. John McCain is so honorable and straight-shooting that the only explanation for his campaign’s headlong dive into sleaze, xenophobia and gonzo bamboozlement is that McCain is so out of it and controlled by his advisors that he doesn’t actually know what they’re doing in his name.

(Just the kind of guy who should be president, right?)

Quite right. In fact, it’s striking the way McCain simply can’t lose when it comes to media adulation — if he runs a positive, substantive, issue-driven campaign, media personalities will sing his praises. If he runs a negative, dishonest, character-assassination-style campaign, media personalities will still sing his praises, blaming his team of Karl Rove acolytes for steering John The Great in the wrong direction.

We talked yesterday about Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in an otherwise great column, falling into the same pattern. McCain, Alter argued, is waging a negative and dishonest campaign, but this is “out of sync with the real guy.” McCain may be on the attack, but his “heart’s not in it.” He’s foolishly taking the advice of “knuckleheads.” It’s that darn Steven Schmidt who deserves most of the blame.

Kevin explained quite well the other day why this it’s-not-McCain’s-fault argument misses the mark.

Apparently he’s just a straight talking guy who woke up one morning and found himself mysteriously under the sway of a vile cabal of political hit men and unable to do anything about it.

Enough’s enough. McCain hired Steve Schmidt, he approves the strategy, and he signs off on the ads. If his campaign is mired in sleaze, it’s not happening despite McCain, it’s happening because of McCain. Stop making excuses for him.

McCain is responsible for his own offensive conduct. The sooner he’s held accountable, the sooner he might be embarrassed into acting with at least a shred of honor again.

I was appalled. Leave the F@#%ing psychobabble out of the presidential campaign reporting. The Cossacks work for the czar. John McCain is absolutely responsible for the actions of his campaign and the Beltway media effort to explain away the sleaze is beneath contempt. John McCain may believe in honor and he may believe himself honorable. He is not running an honorable campaign, and that is the relevant issue.

  • Absolutely no way Obama can win with McCain’s media working against him. Even if Obama were running a flawless campaign (um, far from it), this level of rank bias is just too much to overcome. It’s bad enough that Fox is the propaganda arm of the Republican party. The entire media establishment has become the propaganda arm of the McCain campaign.

    Seen the latest electoral-vote count? Florida’s flipped and that’s only the beginning. We’re screwed.

  • I really think, in view of the videos from this past weekend, with McCain so obviously ‘out of it’, and the times when he had Lieberman with him to correct his statements. Also the instance when one his people said John McCain does not speak for the McCain campaign. McCain has been taken over by his handlers, they are running the campaign, he is doing what he is told. This is not about McCain, it is about the republicans getting one of their own in the White House, how else could all of the evidence of republican crimes of the past 8 years be covered up?

  • McCain is responsible for his own offensive conduct. The sooner he’s held accountable, the sooner he might be embarrassed into acting with at least a shred of honor again.

    In all the accounts I’ve seen, McCain was furious at the smears used against him in the 2000 Republican primary and his (second) wife, Cindy, was devastated. So for McCain to reconcile with the unrepentant architects of those smears — Bush and Rove — demonstrates a real lack of character in McCain.

    For McCain to actively support Rove and Bush in 2004 when they used the same tactics on his purported friend, John Kerry, shows a willingness to sacrifice integrity for personal ambition.

    But McCain hiring Rove’s protege and then to using the same kind of tactics — distortions, innuendo and outright lies — on his own behalf, is proof of a complete absence of personal honor.unworthy of the privilege of being the President of the United States.

  • I have been thinking this for some time. He doesn’t look happy to be on the trail anymore, like he did even when his campaign was bottoming out.

    Yes he’s responsible, morally — but my bet is that after he clinched the nod his campaign was taken over by the same people who ran Bush. He’s either ceded control or had it taken from him.

    It doesn’t make him a better choice — in fact it makes him a worse one, if anything — but it would explain a lot.

  • I agree to a certain extent that they are giving McCain a pass with this type of coverage/narrative. However, I think that there is a pathetic — for lack of a better term — quality that they are conveying that does diminish him. In other words, they are not just trying to defend him. They are reflecting some incompetence and an inherent shift in his ability to control his campaign, message and, as a result, would-be administration.

    I attribute this to the “liberal” media trying to over-compensate/appear neutral but I do believe that in trying to do so, other messages are being sent that are detrimental to McCain.

  • Dammit! Forgot one closing bracket. Here are the last two paragraphs for comment #4:

    But McCain hiring Rove’s protege and then to using the same kind of tactics — distortions, innuendo and outright lies — on his own behalf, is proof of a complete absence of personal honor.

    We liberals express such a tremendous amount of contempt toward the current occupier of the Oval Office that it’s easy to forget we get so angry because we care so much about this country. Put simply, McCain is unworthy of the privilege of being the President of the United States.

  • March, 2009:

    Although America unleashed a massive bomb and missile attack on Iran at 4AM EST this morning, media figures are already stating that President McCain was misled by his advisers into ordering the assault. “His heart’s not in it,” wrote one columnist. “He’s foolishly taking the advice of knuckleheads,” he added.
    Panic buying of gasoline caused many gas stations to close as their stock was sold out. Some charged as much as twenty dollars a gallon as their supplies were depleted. Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm was quoted as saying that Americans should “stop whining and start walking.”
    In hastily prepared speech, Defense Secretary Robert Dornan denied rumors that US troops in Iraq are suffering heavy casualties in what seems to be a spontaneous Muslim uprising. “Victory is still just six months away,” Dornan told the assembled press.

  • My brain hurts!!!!! So McCain is a tough, straight talking maverick, who has haplessly gotten himself entangled in the stings of his handlers? Wouldn’t this make McCain the ‘Maverick Marionette’? Maybe his campaign should adopt that old R&B song as it’s theme – I’m Your Puppet.

  • Look, either McCain is directing his campaign or he isn’t.

    If he is, then journalists who are defending him have been taken for a ride. He tricked them. He pretended to be something he wasn’t and they bought it. (Wot a surprise – a lying politician! Perhaps the reporters are just afraid to admit that someone was able to get past their “hardened cynical exteriors” and fool them with BBQ and playful nicknames.)

    If he isn’t, then his campaign is out of his control. If he can’t control a campaign then how the hell can he be expected to run the Executive Branch of the US Government?

    This narrative from the press makes no sense. Either he’s a lying manipulative bastard OR he’s a man who can’t manage something the size of a campaign staff? Neither of those alternatives look good for McCain. I know the press is trying to cover the ass of “their guy”, but they’re infantalizing him instead. It makes him seem like a child who shouldn’t be allowed near the scissors, let alone the Oval Office.

  • The media created this myth of the honorable John. They have an interest in maintaining it. McCain’s campaign tactics undermine not only the myth but the Washington media’s domination of myth making and collusion with the powers that be. The media made John and John made the media. The facade of honor has holes and cracks and is letting some light shine not just on McCain but on the McCain media monopoly. McCain’s Republican enemies saw through this a long time ago. Is his last refuge, the media, seeing the real John now?

  • All this kvetching about the media is pointless but necessary. Pointless in that they are not interested in truth, only conflict, because conflict creates narrative and narrative sells advertising. Necessary because the media are not interested in truth and if we don’t kvetch about it, they’ll happily turn this campaign and the leadership of the free world into a series pointless sequence of Britney vs. Paris pieces to intercut the commercials.

  • “I’m John McCain and I approved this message” so he still has no responsibility?

  • Last week Mike Barnacle had a totally stunned look on his face when a guest failed to go along with the meme that “the surged worked”. He was literally dumb-founded, as if he had never heard the reasons that Obama never gave full credit to the troop surge for reduction in violence and never conceded that the goals of the surge had been met.

    With that, he gave extra time to another guest to re-“debunk” this anti-meme.

    I wonder who it is who lives in a bubble. Andrea Mitchell finally becomes a fact-witness and becomes credible. But the bubble around MSNBC must be pretty fact-tight for some.

  • Two points:
    First, didn’t many of us do the precise same thing with Hillary? “She’s better than her campaign, it’s all the fault of Penn and McAuliffe?” (And yes, some of the media echoed this, including Keith, until they couldn’t deny the facts any more.)

    Second: This might be ‘preserving his honor’ but it still doesn’t make him any more electable, nor can those who are making the argument think it is in any way making him appear more “Presidential”.

    It is, and always has been, “If the Tsar only knew what was being done in his name…”

  • So—the defense for John McCain’s negativity is that John McCain is a sock puppet? That’s he’s a marionette, and the Rovians are pulling the strings?

    Should America want another four-to-eight years of Bushylvanianism, courtesy of a cigar-store-Indian “war hero” who merely serves the same purpose an an eight-foot fence to block the view of the garbage dump that’s behind it?

    Sorry to say it, but the garbage dump still reeks, and it still draws vermin, and it still leaches into the groundwater—and McMarionette, by the Mitchell/Simon/Barnicle definition, is just a fence.

    America doesn’t need another anti-transparency-in-government-device fence, thank you very much….

  • Here’s a possibly-hopeful thought on this — I agree with most of the points already made, and I find the media’s excuse-making for McCain infuriating.

    But I wonder how this kind of thing will play with those folks who don’t pay much attention to politics, who aren’t aware of the whole history of the Washington press and McCain? We see it and it drives us crazy because we know they’ve been sucking up to him for a long time. As has been pointed out by Steve and others, a lot of the McCain campaign’s attacks seem directed toward his media pals … but how would it look to someone who’s just starting to pay attention for a few minutes now?

    Here’s a tired, old man, who seems like he can barely stay awake during his own speeches half the time, or else he’s giving these bizarre serial-killer smiles… he and his people are all excited about tire gauges. What the hell is that all about? And the people on the news keep talking about how he’s not really calling the shots in his own campaign — is he senile or something? He keeps running these weird ads that don’t make any sense. “The One” — what are they talking about? Why should I care about or vote for this guy?

    Anyway, that’s how I hope a lot of the “undecideds” will see it…

  • Even though I am leery of personal attacks, I wish someone would point out how much Cindy comes across as a nurse ‘tending her patient.’ My mother — the ‘birth one’ not her partner — worked for many years in nursing homes, and the whole style of Cindy is so familiar to me.

  • ARGH. The asshole Jerome Corsi that is connected to the Swiftboaters has written a book, “Obama Nation,” and is now being interviewed on MSNBC.

    At least the interviewer (Contessa something-or-other) is challenging his credibility head on– she said that people are finding TONS of factual errors and actually said “does that mean you don’t have any credibility?” She said the first 200 pages of the 100 page book aren’t about policy, they’re about attacking Obama’s life. She also asked him if he’s so “nonpartisan” if he’s going to write a book about Mccain. Obvious answer– no.

    Now she’s talking to a DNC representative about the book– and she asked her “how are you going to respond to this? this guy helped bring down Kerry with attacks like these, don’t you have to respond?” All the DNC talking head keeps saying is that we’re going to focus on issues and not respond to such “silliness.”

    Ugh. If this guy actually gets to go around the MSM channels and talk about this shit the Dems BETTER expose him as the anti-Dem LYING propagandaist that he is.

  • It’s all crap. It comes down to judgement. I didn’t like Hillary in the primary because I thought she made a mistake when she authorized Iraq, and damned if she didn’t do the same thing when she voted for Kyl-Lieberman. Once is a mistake, twice is failing to learn from your mistakes. If McCain can’t figure out that he’s surrounded himself with a pit of vipers, then I sure as hell don’t want him in the office. It’s not like he’s had one bad ad that reflected poorly on him. He’s had bad ads, bad statements, and he’s not changing course. If he really didn’t like his campaign, he’d have fired the folks in charge.

  • Not to put to fine a point on it, John McCain would rather win an election at the cost of sacrificing honor and decency than lose it while preserving them.

  • I agree with Prup re it looks like Cindy is attending her “patient” at times. And when Andrea and others say outright that McCain is not in control of his own campaign and feel sorry for him it is yet another response to perceived incapacity or incompetence.

    Who wants another president where we say: oh poor him he doesn’t know what is going on, he believes anything his handlers/lobbyists tell him.

  • Now she’s talking to a DNC representative about the book– and she asked her “how are you going to respond to this? this guy helped bring down Kerry with attacks like these, don’t you have to respond?” All the DNC talking head keeps saying is that we’re going to focus on issues and not respond to such “silliness.”

    Democrats are truly foolish creatures who have no pattern recognition skills.

    To review:

    Carter (1980) – above harsh campaigning, lost.

    Mondale (1984) – told voters truth about defecits and taxes, lost.

    Dukakis (1988) – calm, intellectual, refused to react emotionally to smears, lost big.

    Clinton (1992, 1996) – philosophy: hit back twice as hard in the same news cycle every time – only two wins for Dems in last 30 years

    Gore (2000) – intellectual, above the fray, lost gimme election

    Kerry (2004) – almost identical to quoted Dem above – stuck with “issues” not “silliness”, lost.

    Really, this seems so easy a first grader could figure it out. How come the brightest minds in the Democratic party cant?

  • The reason pundits are loath to admit that McCain is fully behind the direction of his own campaign is because to do so would be to admit they were wrong about McCain himself. Whatever about the BBQ media, even pundits who pride themselves on being above that kind of thing aren’t really very good pundits if they were so wrong about McCain’s character.

    To that extent, this is as much about how the Low Road Express makes the journalists look as it is about how it makes McCain look.

  • 12. Algernon said: It really comes down to this: “I’m John McCain and I approved this message.”

    What else is there? Either that statement means something or it doesn’t.

  • McCain, Alter argued, is waging a negative and dishonest campaign, but this is “out of sync with the real guy.”

    Bullshit. If you look beneath the carefully-crafted image, McCain has been an asshole for his entire adult life. Incidents illustrating this pop up periodically from high school all the way to the present. Negative and dishonest is the real guy. McCain occasionally refers to himself as a man of honor but his actions have never reflected that self-delusion.

  • But the thing is, BOTH sides are right. This ISN’T John McCain’s way of running a campaign, and he IS being fooled by a cabal of political hitmen, but this just goes to show why he shouldn’t be president. And as I’ve been saying for quite awhile, the people who want him to go negative don’t EXPECT him to become president. They just want to hurt Obama, and the fact that McCain is dumb enough to go along with them just shows how foolish and desperate he is.

    And btw, I’ve been predicting for some time that the media would eventually turn on McCain. August can be a loooong month for presidential politics, and September and October still leave plenty of time for this to happen. The fact that many in the media are openly talking about this at the beginning of August is not a good sign for McCain. Particularly as most people won’t even start paying attention to this stuff until September, which is when the real election season begins for most voters. If this is how August begins for McCain, he’ll be screwed by October. I guarantee it.

  • But, but, but he was a POW for 5 1/2 years, he was tortured. That excuses everything.

  • If McCain is ‘uncomfortable’ with his campaign but cannot do anything about it, he should withdraw his campaign immediately.

  • Oh God not this again. What else would President McCain be uncomfortable with but approve of anyway?

    “Gee fellas, I didn’t want to turn the Middle East into a radioactive cloud but my advisors told me to.

    …

    …

    Heh.”

    In the Mavericky Maverick’s honor I offer a new term: “Repuppetcan.”

  • It seems delinquent of political commentators not to deal with the implications of a candidate not being in control of his own campaign, especially the words that come out of his own mouth. They should be discussing what this says about his ability to control to control his own administration?

  • I find it hard to listen to talk of McCain’s purported authenticity as a real guy, in part, because some of his mannerisms during speeches and interviews strike me as exactly the opposite — artificial, contrived, staged.

    After some of his most insincere, ridiculous misstatements on serious topics, he has paused and pasted on his biggest smile to do a slow scan of the audience.

    That alone leaves my stomach churning; the “he’s great but being misled” cheerleaders just stir up the foul sensations… their implication being that to recoil from his words and mannerisms is judgmental and short-sighted, unwilling to see the “real” guy.

  • Typical Republican / media rhetoric where they want to have it both ways:

    McCain has so much experience he knows what to do, he’s the commander in chief, with all the answers

    AND

    McCain has been taken advantage by his advisors, and he feels uncomfortable with how his campaign has been run lately. He can’t “possibly be tracking all of this himself.”

    Now: You’re either confident and know what you’re doing OR You’re a dolt who needs people to tell you what to do. NOT Both.

    When are the low information voters going to wake up? Hello!

  • When are the low information voters going to wake up? Hello!

    Never.

    That’s why they are low information voters.

    And there are more of them then there are of us.

    So we can either figure out how to reach them and win their votes, or we can lose elections. So far I see yet another Democratic campaign focused solely on winning the respect of high information voters. I Obama wants to be President of the Debating Society, that’s a good strategy. I’d rather he be President of the United States – as in the states uniting a few high information voters will millions who really shouldn’t be votingbut will anyway.

  • Obama should really pick up on this and expose the dichotomy… (Although he shouldn’t use that word, because the Republicans might not understand what that means, it sounds too elitist)

    Obama should ask McCain straight to his face:

    Are you in charge of your own campaign and directing/approving all the ads, because that is what you’ve been projecting? Or. Have your advisers been running all your current ads without your knowledge, because that is what the media has been saying about you – you know… that you’re not in control?

    Obama needs to make sure to NOT use the word negative ads; otherwise it’s going to be a discussion on what constitutes a negative ad. We don’t want McCain to pull the famous: “It all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” We all know they are negative ads, even the Republicans have said it.

    By asking that question McCain will have no other choice than to pick one, as he can’t have it both ways.

    If he pics #1 he admits running negative ads and is proud of it, which destroys his ‘honorable’ label

    or he pics #2 and he officially ends his media darling label, because I don’t think the sycophants will forgive him for such a direct humiliation of their ‘insights.

    Tough choice.

  • Poor old John McCain. So honorable, and so uncomfortable that circumstances (his inability to connect with voters via either personality or issues) require him to go negative.

    Poor, poor John McCain.

    Give me a friggin’ break. There no better evidence how the MSM has drunk the McCain Kool-Aid than this rush to rationalize.

    Get a clue. He’s a mean, mean man and a liar to boot.

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