All the legal-scholar talking heads, for whom Supreme Court jurisprudence is breakfast-table talk, think they know it all. Sarah Palin is a know-nothing. When asked by Katie Couric to start naming names, she didn’t provide her top-ten most-hated Supreme Court cases. What an idiot, they laugh and blog.
But, truth be told, it’s hard to believe that Sarah Palin is the ditz that conventional talking-head wisdom so dearly wants her to be. Could she really know nothing about the Supreme Court? It’s especially hard to believe if you’ve actually heard her talk about a Supreme Court decision she wasn’t happy with. (Hear her on
Exxon v.
Baker,
here.)
If you’re really paying attention, you know what’s going on here. You see it in the hesitancy. You see it in the smile. You see it in John McCain’s smirks and laughs with Katie and Sarah the other night. There is a clear strategy in place.
As McCain himself
told Couric: “Look, I understand this day and age of ‘gotcha’ journalism.” Palin agreed, with her running mate by her side: “This is all about ‘gotcha’ journalism. A lot of it is. But that’s okay, too.”
Conventional wisdom had it that Sarah Palin was meant to rally the conservative base of the Republican party, previously unexcited about John McCain, using her pro-life credentials (she lives it) as one key point of attraction. She does that. But a few not-so-hot interviews opens a whole new opportunity for utilizing “The Hottest Governor, from the Coldest State.”
John McCain, formerly considered a
Today Show co-host, is heading a ticket that is now running against the media. In fact, McCain-Palin looks a
little like the campaign of a maverick scorned. Media’s ex-favorite Republican gets his revenge.
But it could certainly work. And there is certainly legitimacy to it.
Gwen Ifill is this week’s gift. That she is moderating the debate while working on a pro-Obama book is confirmation that this anti-media reflex is a promising one. And you can count on the MSM to provide McCain’s camp with endless fodder in the weeks ahead. (Just ask Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, who makes a living off media bias.) First it was MSNBC, which the campaign has not been shy in criticizing for pro-Obama bias. Now it can be anyone asking quiz-show like questions to the Republican ticket, anyone writing with a flair for dramatic criticism . . .
anyone. There’s a lot of criticism out there, and if it’s possible to find a single, plausible way to explain it all away, elite media bias might just be the one.
Conservative Republicans who don’t have Dan Rather to kick around anymore are not the only ones who might respond favorably to the campaign’s anti-media campaign.
Asked by Pew in February, 31 percent of Democrats polled said the press had been too tough on Hillary Clinton. I’ve never bought that Palin would necessarily bring bitter Hillary voters in, but a “maverick” ticket that’s running against Washington
and the media? Hmmm. This might have some possibilities.
There is a definite danger that the campaign might take it too far, of course. Especially if Palin doesn’t do a whole lot of set-speech talking in the coming weeks. But if she continues to do talk radio — she sat for excellent interviews with radio hosts Hugh Hewitt and Sean Hannity this week — if she continues to impress Americans with her instincts and story, it may just work.
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On Wednesday, radio star Rush Limbaugh — who two decades ago established himself as a one-man alternative to the mainstream media — declared that “there’s no journalism today.” Every day Hannity describes “2008 as the year that journalism died” on his radio and TV shows — inspired by their love for Obama, dubbing them the Democratic nominee’s press-secretary corps. If the McCain-Palin ticket can further expose media bias on the road to the White House, John McCain — unexpected though it might be — could very well become another kind of hero: slayer of the MSM.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.
