Random Acts of Writing: Campaign whiners
By Craig Carter
Saturday, October 4, 2008 11:21 PM PDT
You can tell who’s losing in a political campaign. More times than not, it’s the candidate who whines the most about media coverage.
For instance, way back in the good old days of 2004, when John Kerry got absolutely no bounce in the polls after the Democratic National Convention, his campaign engaged in a month-long whine fest about how the media refused to report the blunders of the Bush administration, and they whined even louder about how negatively he was portrayed on shows like Saturday Night Live and the late night talk shows.
Then earlier this year, Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent, or should I say wasted, a lot of time whining and moaning about how the media wouldn’t treat a male candidate as they did Hillary.
There’s a polite and an impolite way to respond to this whining. One is to refer to the claims as male bovine fecal matter, and the other is to say malarkey. (Of course, malarkey is the same as male bovine fecal matter. So?)
In case you hadn’t noticed, the McCain camp has spent a lot of time of late whining and moaning about how the media reports on their campaign. The contention being the entirety of the media is manned (and womaned) by liberals of both the mouth-breathing and hippie-freak, free-love type that are going out of their way to humiliate and otherwise obstruct the McCain campaign.
However, it isn’t we liberals of the hippie-freak, free-love and mouth-breathing types that forced McCain to foolishly “suspend” his campaign to supposedly concentrate on the financial bailout plan. (Of course, McCain probably wouldn’t have looked quite so pathetic had he headed directly to Washington after he made his dramatic announcement, instead of doing an interview with Katie Couric, having a nice dinner and staying the night at a nice hotel in New York, then having a nice breakfast before finally heading to D.C.)
It also wasn’t the liberals of the hippie-freak, free-love and mouth-breathing types that held the arms of the McCain people behind their backs, forcing them to carefully pick and choose where Sarah Palin would appear and to whom she would speak.
When you get right down to it, that’s been probably the biggest blunder of the McCain campaign so far because, if the perception is your running mate is inexperienced, unversed in world affairs and not very knowledgeable, your first priority should be to prove that perception wrong, not go out of your way to perpetuate it by acting as if you’re trying to hide her inexperience, ignorance of basic world affairs and lack of real political instincts. And let’s face it boys and girls, Gov. Palin hasn’t exactly shown herself to be a whiz at politics so far.
That’s either because she isn’t a whiz, or the McCain campaign is doing a horrible job of proving otherwise. Either way, it’s a political blunder of the first order.
Granted, one of the reasons I’d never want to run for national office is I surely wouldn’t want to have someone like Tina Fey parody me on national television.
However, it’s not like the people who are running for office don’t know what’s going on and what they’re going to have to put up with to get elected.
So in essence, while it may be true there are times when the media is going to be kinder to Sen. Obama than they are to Sen. McCain, the McCain people and their supporters don’t really help themselves when they constantly whine about how they’re not getting better coverage because, in the end, the people doing the most whining are seen as ” well ” whiners, and in politics, perception is danged near everything, and no one wants to vote for a presidential candidate who’s perceived as a whiner.
Craig Carter, an Ontario resident, writes a bi-weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Carter can be directed to: Craig Carter, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914
