A modest proposal: Please ban campaign spokesmen from the air waves

[Jack Rabbit]

Television and radio news programs should take all the "campaign spokesmen" off the air. It doesn't matter whose spokesmen, just get them off the air. Stop booking them for interviews on Meet the Nation or Face the Press, appearances on Hardball or Countdown or CSPAN, or casual chats with Larry King.

The job of a campaign spokeman is to obfuscate, hide the truth, sell refrigerators to Eskimos and snake oil to the rest of us, and just make up "facts" out of thin air. A campaign spokesman isn't just uninformative, he's counter-informative. It isn't that he is performing no useful service to the voting public, he's more often than not doing a disservice.

Right now, like most people, I'm much more peeved at the McCain campaign than the Obama campaign for the sudden decline of intelligent discourse. It is, after all, Rick Davis who says (as if any one appointed him to make this decision) that this should be an election about personalities and not issues and it is Steve Schmidt who is playing Svengali to Sarah Palin's Trilby O'Ferrall least she put her foot in her mouth in the next few days and show what else besides that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are private corporations that she doesn't know. Speaking of Governor Palin, the PR wizards in the McCain campaign also concocted talking points about her foreign policy expertise ("she the governor of the state that's right next to Russia") and her military experience ("she's the commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard"). Since such credentials as presented are parodies of themselves, one might think they should show up in an Obama ad soon. And now we find from these same slick salesmen that Obama was obviously insulting Governor Palin when he wasn't even talking about her.

Altough they've not said anything nearly as outrageous, don't think for a minute that Senator Obama doesn't have people like that working for him. He, too, has his David Axelrod. But there's no reason to listen to his spin, either. Just because a campaign consultant works for your guy doesn't make him something other than an occupational liar. What was that about lipstick on a pig, again?

Four years ago, NBC did a disservice to the voting public by handing over the microphone to Karen Hughes and Mike McCurry for analysis. Either of them could have mailed in their remarks a week ahead of time. If McCurry sounded the less ridiculous of the two, it's because Kerry actually won all three debates; don't think for a minute that really had any influence on anything he said. Ms. Hughes was forced, as a loyal and professional campaign spokesperson, to call black white and white black.

Let's have no more of that. Enough!

[Pisces]

1. WHat, then the canidadates themselves would have to speak on their own behalf. What

would Sarah Palin doo???? I think this is a great idea. We get 24/7 spin from these fools.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Putting this up for consumption in the next time zone

!!