If You Thought Bob Schieffer Was UnBiased During the Debate, Watch Again

McCamy Taylor

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Fri Oct-17-08 05:13 PM
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If You Thought Bob Schieffer Was UnBiased During the Debate, Watch Again

Before the debate, I wrote a journal about Bob Schieffer�s history of bias towards George W. Bush and John McCain. If you did not read it already, here is a link.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/315

I speculated that wily old Schieffer might be tempted to lob softballs at McCain in this last debate, in an attempt to change the game. If so, the way to catch him at it would be to look for a certain question. McCain had vowed to discuss the topic of Bill Ayers to Obama�s face, since his running mate, Sarah Palin had been talking about the professor non stop behind Obama�s back. As Chris Matthews had pointed out, this would not be good for John McCain, since it would allow Sen. Obama to attack him from a �defensive position�. The Democratic nominee would be able to tell the world the true story, which would sound very different from Palin�s �pals around with terrorists�---and John McCain would sound like a fear mongering jerk.

If Bob Schieffer was biased towards McCain, he would attempt to help his man weasel out of the predicament he had created for himself, by making McCain the injured party . He would do this by pretending that McCain had been the victim of smears every bit as outrageous as anything that Palin and her supporters may have shouted (you know, traitor, off with his head, kill him ) in order to win sympathy votes for McCain and make Obama look like a dirty trickster who had it coming.

Here is what I wrote before the debate:

Is Schieffer paid to report the news the way he would like it to be? Apparently. If Schieffer is true to form, tomorrow night we can expect him to comment upon the way that both campaigns have turned negative, giving John McCain a platform from which to play outraged innocence (�Why you young whippersnapper, I spent the Vietnam War in a box to preserve your right to go to any school you wanted to and this is how you repay me!�).

And here is what he did during the debate. Please go to the New York Times debate video and transcript. At 23: 17 you can read and see Bob Schieffer attempt to cover John McCain�s ass on the whole issue of negativity in the campaign:

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/third-presidential-debate.html

SCHIEFFER: Senator Obama, your campaign has used words like "erratic," "out of touch," "lie," "angry," "losing his bearings" to describe Senator McCain.
Senator McCain, your commercials have included words like "disrespectful," "dangerous," "dishonorable," "he lied." Your running mate said he "palled around with terrorists."
Are each of you tonight willing to sit at this table and say to each other's face what your campaigns and the people in your campaigns have said about each other?
And, Senator McCain, you're first.

This allowed John McCain to refer to the single instance in which he corrected a woman who called Obama an arab----an event which his base, the press hyped over the weekend as proof that McCain is really a fair man---as a broad pattern of standing up for his opponent. And it allowed him to tell the world how hurt he was that Rep. John Lewis had criticized him and Gov. Palin for playing around with incendiary language.

MCCAIN: That, to me, was so hurtful.

Thanks to the moderator Bob Schieffer, John McCain was the one attacking from a defensive position. He was the injured party.

The Obama campaign must have expected Schieffer to try a stunt like this, too, because they had their response ready.

OBAMA: Well, look, you know, I think that we expect presidential campaigns to be tough. I think that, if you look at the record and the impressions of the American people -- Bob, your network just did a poll, showing that two-thirds of the American people think that Senator McCain is running a negative campaign versus one-third of mine.

So much for Schieffer�s journalistic objectivity. His own network had shown that McCain�s campaign was twice as negative as Obama�s, but the moderator tried to portray them as equally ugly.

In the end, even with Schieffer�s help, McCain lost that round. He said he did not care about Ayers---and then he demanded to know about Ayers. Obama showed that there was nothing to know about Ayers. The McCain campaign would have been better off leaving Ayers the subject of robo-calls and fascist style rallies, since knowledge has a way of reducing fear, and Obama, like FDR, is an excellent teacher.