McCain mobilizes, and cows, his 'base'

[Joanne98]

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." -- Gore Vidal

"The (Bush) aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' " -- Ron Suskind

"This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." -- Rick Davis, McCain campaign manager

Unfortunately Vidal is probably wrong, considering that most Americans get their tiny bits of information from television. Davis may well be right, despite the critical issues facing the country, and that his campaign is running to continue the very Bush-Cheney "faith-based" policies that created the disaster of the past eight years.

This is the background you need to understand the successful McCain effort to cow the corporate media into submission in the final weeks before the election. Remember that McCain called the big-time media "his base" and there's been a long love-fest between them. But the old fighter jock will now slap around and intimidate his love -- and many Americans will approve. It will be the Rovian tactic that puts the race within stealing distance, if not produce an outright McCain victory.

This was at work when MSNBC replaced Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as anchors of its election coverage with David Gregory. MSNBC blew its convention coverage by giving too little attention to the floor speeches, including a barn burner by John Kerry and a fine speech by Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. And, yes, mic-hogs Olbermann and Matthews could have done better. But they also asked some of the only critical -- in a journalistic, not pejorative, sense -- questions about the proceedings, particularly the Republican convention.

I'm not a big TV watcher, but when I've seen Gregory host Race for the White House, he not only brings a discernible anti-Obama slant but he repeats every pro-McCain cliche, particularly the "he's the maverick" line. The Right has identified the popular Olbermann as someone to take out (I feel sorry for his protege, the intelligent and engaging Rachel Maddow, starting a new show). Meanwhile, Fox gets a free pass.

Next we have the unprecedented handling of Sarah Palin. She is supposed to be so plain-spoken and fearless, but the McCain camp has kept her sealed off from the media in a way that has never happened in a major campaign before. She has faced none of the tough questioning that vetted Barack Obama over 19 months -- or Hillary Clinton, for that matter. (Obama received much coverage, but an independent audit showed three-quarters of the stories were negative.) Never held a press conference as VP candidate. Legitimate questions about this highly inexperienced newcomer to the national scene, who will be a heartbeat away from an old man with a POW-scarred body, were decried as "sexism" by the McCain camp.

Her first appearance will be with the McCain-friendly Charles Gibson of ABC. We have no sense whether the questions will be submitted in advance, or whether the McCain team will have a hand in editing the final product. One can imagine the gauzy, softball interview to come. CBS on its own edited out McCain's embarrassing gaffe about Iraq. Even the New York Times and Washington Post are treading carefully (and when they report the facts, these reach a minority of voters). These are supposedly the "real journalists."

What is not being exposed are McCain and Palin's repeated lies and misstatements on issues of substance. Nor are they being challenged to discuss the specifics of their positions -- something Obama has been endlessly hounded over, even though he has done so repeatedly. How far out of the mainstream are Palin's -- and McCain's -- views? People don't know. Perhaps most shocking is how the media -- and especially the press, the last line of defense in a democracy -- are letting McCain and Palin "rebrand" themselves as "mavericks" of some new party, instead of reporting accurately that they would continue most or all of the Bush-Cheney Republican policies.

The corporate media has business interests to protect. And, "the facts have a left-wing bias." So even factual reporting will be hard to come by. If the polls are to be believed, this race will be very close and voters won't really know who Sarah Palin is or what she stands for. Nor will they really know McCain's close alignment with the extreme Right of his own party and its policies, which he will continue or even extend with more force.

I wonder what happens if the Democrats can't win this election. It may have something to do with the latent racism of enough white Americans (but don't kid yourselves -- the Right would have had a trick up its sleeve against Hillary, too). It may be stolen again. But it will certainly weigh heavily on the combination of an increasingly ignorant electorate and the shameful abrogation of the public trust by the mainstream media. Will we really have a democracy left and will our votes be worth a damn?

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