pH Reading — Wednesday, September 10, 2008

By Patrick Henry 

 

Is Trig at the Heart of Media’s Reaction to Palin?
RealClearPolitics · Mona Charen
There were basically two things known about Sarah Palin when her name was announced on Aug. 29 and the mediasphere began to shudder and pulsate: She was a recently elected governor and the mother of five children including a handicapped infant. The scorn from the mainstream press and the left-leaning blog world was both intense and instantaneous. Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic immediately began circulating rumors that Trig was not the governor’s baby — that she had engaged in a huge charade to cover up her teen daughter’s illegitimate child. The New York Times reported on the front page that Palin had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek described the reaction of most newsrooms to Palin’s elevation as “literally laughter.” US Weekly rushed out a cover story picturing Palin holding her baby son with the headline “Babies, Lies, & Scandal.”…

pH: Palin’s treatment at the hands of the media continues to be an issue. The press is determined to nick her before the election — and with just 57 days remaining — is working overtime at it. Watch any Jeffrey Toobin commentary on CNN if this seems an exaggeration. Make no mistake: Toobin is a smarter, slicker, more subtle version of Keith Olbermann.

Running Against Resentment
Indianapolis Star · Marie Cocco
If you talk to a Democrat who’s been around awhile — not someone who is reciting talking points for the Obama campaign — there is a nervousness that feels like the jitters of so many election years past…

McPalin rattles Team Obama: The Democratic ticket finds itself trapped by a McCain-Palin double-team.
Los Angeles Times · Jonah Goldberg
Barack Obama, a famous fan of pickup basketball, must recognize his plight: It’s two on one now. John McCain drafted Gov. Sarah Palin, the star point guard from the Wasilla Warriors, to double-team Obama. (McCain’s team doesn’t care if no one covers Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, “I’m open! I’m open!” But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.)…

Sliming Palin: False Internet claims and rumors fly about McCain’s running mate.
Newsweek · Brooks Jackson, Jess Henig, Emi Kolawole, Joe Miller and Lori Robertson
We’ve been flooded for the past few days with queries about dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain’s running mate, Gov. Palin. We find that many are completely false, or misleading…

The Hunt for Sarah October
Wall Street Journal · John Fund
Democrats understand Sarah Palin is a formidable political force who has upset the Obama victory plan. The latest Washington Post/ABC Poll shows John McCain taking a 12-point lead over Barack Obama among white women, a reversal of Mr. Obama’s eight-point lead last month. It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin’s hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29…

How Obama Blew It: Pays Price in Polls for Bungled Attacks on Sarah
New York Post · Kirsten Powers
Obama’s toughest challenge has always been to connect with working-class swing voters. So attacking the poster child for small-town values, Sarah Palin, was a bad strategy. No, Obama didn’t engage in the mass sneering at Palin - but he did fall into the trap of disrespecting her. When McCain chose her, the Obama campaign’s first response was to ridicule the size of her town. Then the candidate himself began referring to her as a “former mayor” when she is in fact a sitting governor…

It’s Not Going to Be About the Issues
RealClearPolitics · Tom Bevan
Last week McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was taken to task by the Obama campaign for stating the obvious. “This election is not about issues,” Davis told the Washington Post. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” Davis’s comment is true about all campaigns, of course, but especially this one. This year’s contest features two insurgent candidates whose campaigns are built around themes anchored largely in their biographies…

Straining to reach money goal, Obama presses donors
International Herald Tribune · Michael Luo and Jeff Zeleny
After months of record-breaking fund-raising, a new sense of urgency in Senator Barack Obama’s fund-raising team is palpable as the full weight of the campaign’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election is suddenly upon it…

Front-runner unplugged: Media Infatuation with him backfires
Boston Herald · Michael Graham
I have one piece of advice for the struggling Obama campaign: Fire MSNBC. They’re killing your campaign…

Choosing Trig
Townhall · Rich Lowry
As many as an estimated nine out of 10 children with Down syndrome are aborted in the womb, sought out by increasingly sophisticated prenatal tests and eliminated as too flawed, too burdensome, too different to live. This is the ugly eugenic underbelly of American life, even as we congratulate ourselves on our tolerance and diversity…

Obama, Dems sharpen personal attacks on Palin
Politico · Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen
Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are intensifying their attacks on Sarah Palin, as her sustained and surprising central role in this race is upending Obama’s strategy and often overshadowing McCain…

The Fallacy of ‘Green Jobs’
RealClearPolitics · John Stossel
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a great twofer pitch: “green jobs.” It sounds like a winner. In one fell swoop he can promise to end unemployment and fix and save the planet from climate change…

November Lineup: Obama vs. Obama
RealClearPolitics · Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Now that the conventions are over, it is evident that the battle of John McCain is over (McCain won) and the battle of Barack Obama will determine the outcome of the election. Now that McCain has definitively, and I suspect irreversibly, separated himself from George Bush, he has become an acceptable alternative to Obama for voters seeking change. The question now is whether Obama’s extra quotient of change — or the different direction that change will take — is worth the risk of electing him…

Fresh blood for the vampire
Salon · Camille Paglia
It’s heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain — that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won’t die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces…