How Now, Horatio?

September 5th, 2008 by TRex @ 9:20 pm| Posted in 2008 Race, media, monsters of entitlement |

I had some less than charitable things to say to Time magazine’s Jay Carney when I addressed a question to him at a YKos 2007 panel.  He seemed at the time to be the very essence of the Beltway Bubble Boy, sitting there looking like he was eating broken glass every time Glenn Greenwald opened his mouth, but I was appalled on his behalf by the behavior of McCain campaign’s spokesminx Nicole Wallace in the clip above.

In a jaw-dropping appearance on MSNBC Thursday, McCain aide Nicole Wallace told Time’s Jay Carney that the press wouldn’t get a chance to take shots at the hockey mom turned McCain running mate.

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.

Given the highly combustible mixture that is Palin’s reed-thin resume, radical right-wing agenda and mushrooming portfolio of scandals, Team McCain’s effort to field the first stealth vice presidential candidate in history comes as no surprise.

What does surprise me is the breathtakingly high-handed tone the McCain campaign has taken with certain members of the press lately.  What happened to those halcyon days of barbecue and tire-swings out in Sedona?  Even formerly reliable Village holdout Joe Klein has rediscovered his inner watchdog, and apparently it’s a rottweiler:

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

Yeeeaaaahhh!  That’s the spirit!

In my life, I figured “I’ve been obsessively refreshing ‘Swampland’ all day” would be something I’d be about as likely to say as “another tour de force from Rupert Everett” or “a vocal performance of stunning restraint and exquisite taste by Mariah Carey”, but there you go.  I’ve been poised like a hawk on a wire all day waiting to see what Carney’s next move would be.

Sometime around the five o’clock whistle, we got this carefully worded bulletin:

September 5, 2008 5:10

Why It Matters

Posted by Jay Carney | Comments (79) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This

David Frum, conservative author and former Bush speechwriter, weighs in over at NRO on the question of why we should care whether or not Sarah Palin should be subjected to taking questions from the press. His answer: it was the same contempt for elites, both in the media and more broadly, that caused the Bush communications effort to fail after the president’s post-9/11 popularity began to erode. Political operatives love to talk about circumventing the media and other co-called “elites” — i.e., independent specialists, observers and thinkers. The operatives convince themselves they can take their candidate’s message directly to the people — on their terms, without all that poking and prodding and skepticism. That’s propaganda. In a democratic society, it rarely works for long.

He’s right, of course, but exactly how is it all that different from what has been steadily streaming out the roof and down the rain gutters of the Bush White House for the last eight years?  Hot and cold running propaganda.

That aside, though, I salute this new found journalistic passion over at Time and wish them well on their quest.  Seriously, Jay Carney shouldn’t have to be explaining “why it matters” to anyone.  It should be completely self-evident why it matters.  The American public has a right to know what they’re getting into here and apparently the McCain campaign has entrusted the fourth estate with the sober and responsible job of vetting his running mate.  Don’t be surprised when that comes back and bites you on the ass, hmmkay?