When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack

In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”

Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”

“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.

“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.

Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”

Blogger Matt Yglesias sent out a new post thread with the subject, “The line on Palin.”

“John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern,” Yglesias wrote.

Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. “The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her,” Kilgore said.

Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had “openly backed” parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he was offering “typical offhand political analysis” and that Journolist was one of many online places he scoured for news to post to his blog.

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get,” Hayes wrote.

Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: “I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.”

Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,” he wrote.

Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: “Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’.”

Kilgore wasn’t sold: “I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ bullshit about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way.”

Zenilman of Politico, a purportedly nonpartisan journalist, weighed in with tactical advice: “The experience attack is a stupid one. It’s absolutely the wrong tack — the tack that McCain took when he was losing, and that Hillary and Biden took all primaries.”

Joe Klein of Time stopped by with an update on the latest from his magazine: “We’re reporting that she actually supported the bridge to nowhere. First flub?”

Klein, who displayed an independent streak in other circumstances (“anybody who knows me knows I do my own thinking,” he said in a Wednesday interview), seemed to exude more partisanship that day than usual.

As the morning wore on into the afternoon, some on Journolist came to believe the Palin pick had been shrewd. Palin was coming off as appealing and a maverick, they worried.

“Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.”

Ryan Avent, then blogging for the Economist and now an editor there, agreed that criticizing Palin’s experience might not work. “I really don’t think the experience argument needs to be made by the Dems. It’s completely obvious to any reasonable person. Instead, hammer away at the fact that she has terrible positions on things like choice, and on the fact that she has no ideas on the issues important to people,” he wrote.

Journolist’s founder Ezra Klein, now a blogger at the Washington Post, reached an entirely different conclusion: “I see no reason to attack Palin. I think you accurately describe Palin and attack McCain.” Klein linked to an article he had written for the American Prospect that calmly described Palin’s thin resume.

Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.

So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you LOVE is sick.” John 11:3

We have been brainwashed into believing we need a huge Establishmedia to ration our information when we don’t. There are two ways to make the media unbiased, one would be put a $1000 bounty on liberal journalists, the other would be to close the corporate newsrooms and put them out to pasture replaced by smaller more dynamic news orgs that will give a variety of thought. Right now we have giant corps like GE who use their news programs as nothing more than write offs to filter information. We have no variety of opinion in the large news companies and only tiny little FOX exploring the corruption of our gummit. Now is the time to pull the plug on these money pits and let Capitalism take over. Could there possibly be anything more corrupt than NBDNC?

When you have an internet bringing information to your fingertips in real time do you really need a giant monolith deciding what they will and won’t report. Do we need these corrupt corps or their distorters being activists for the DNC to get their politicians elected? It is time to call them out for the commie propagandists we know they are and make them suffer for their one sided coverage. We don’t need them nearly as bad as they need us and it is time to make them pay. It’s time to save some trees and dolphins for these Eart worshippers and tell them to keep their yellow ink and nightly snooze. A bit ironic they lecture us on protecting the forest while they are using trainloads of trees to print their birdcage liners.

We now have been told the Stone Age Press was colluding to make sure all of obozo’s questions in the campaign were no brainers. If anybody would ax a question about his past mentors, the questioner was going to be labeled a racist by all the other journalists including Media Matter$oro$. This was a coordinated attack on the FOX reporters and even attacked Steponallofus when he questioned Black Oblack on Minister Wright. Reporters completely backed down as we all remember the different rules that Gov Palin was exposed to. Small wonder he looked so brilliant while she was sliced and diced into a terrified monkey. Wonder how many emails were exchanged on what techniques and tactics to use to unnerve her and edit for maximum effect. Was SNL also involved?

This journalistic malfeasance is more proof we need to take this out of a bloated socialist boondoggle and put into a free market. If we had a Capitalistic system there would be an investigation into this MediaGate and find out who and where it went. Was it only journalists or were their heads of corps or people in the campaign and who? These questions need to be answered to see how the election was manipulated from the commie-cult media and where do they go? We know it was coordinated out of the Ohbummer campaign although we still have to know how many journalists participated. We have to take those reporters who felt their job was that of a political hack was more important than any impartiality. Once again the corrupt journalists give a bad name to the other 2%.

How many more of these scandals can the Establishmedia absorb before the entire façade comes goes Humpty Dumpty? When you have people who are obvious hacks delivering the daily dose of propaganda you can’t have too many more of these scandals pounding extra nails into the Press Corpse’ coffin. To imagine the smartest man in the history of the planet needing such a choreographed campaign while trashing Palin worse than Bush. Did the Obozo campaign write the questions for Gibson and Colic? Did they pick out Gibson’s glasses? Did they tell them how they wanted her to be portrayed or did they have to be told since they attend the same strategy sessions? To imagine the levels they needed to reach to get below the Bush campaign standards they not only did it but exceeded anybody’s expectations.

It is time to bring a fairness nondoctrine to the Samestream mediots. We need to have the same number of Conservative outlets as there are liberal. There is only one way to guarantee this and that is to remove all govt regs and subsidies to let the market determine the winners and losers. If we would fire the losers to let the market determine rather than the corrupt networks we have now the spectrum would be covered. If we had a solid representation of numerous Conservative outlets, there would be no limits to the number. This is exactly what they don’t want since the liberal ideas would be left on the waste heap of histoir where they belong.

The Dinosaur Press has become as corrupt and partisan as the gummit. We no longer believe a single report they give and are laughing off their claims. How many times can you report Conservatives are racist poo poo heads. We already know they are an arm of the DNC living off the fat of giant corporations w/no regard for truth or profit. It is too important to explain what Capitalism is and how it can bring freedom and prosperity to not only every person in America but the World. Our Exstream Wing media is standing in the way of that information to continue their evangelization of their Commie Cult. Those giant corps and banks need to cut them free to sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas to force them to report the Truth no matter where it runs or whose toes it taps. Now more than ever it is time to launch a new media who is not a braindead ideologue but a Free market warrior hungry for the Truth. We need to bring the power of Capitalism to the media and bring back a truly Free Press. That said a bounty would be more effective.

Pray for America

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