Frank Rich's columns in the New York Times over the past several years are the closest the Grey Lady has come to The Daily Show. Not because Rich is funny -- though at times he is -- but because both Rich and Jon Stewart take aim not only at the 21st Century's Republican Party, but also the media.
This week's column, entitled "Obama Outwits the Bloviators," is no exception. Written on the heels of a Democratic convention marked by strong declarations of party unity and a final night that in more ways than one may define the next two months on the campaign trail for both parties, it may be the clearest picture of the state of Campaign 2008.
In deference to fair use guidelines, I urge you to read the entire column, but a few choice paragraphs deserve attention here.
Noting that polls indicate Democrats are no less united than Republicans, Rich argues,
But empirical evidence can’t compete with a favorite golden oldie like the Clinton soap opera. So when Hillary Clinton said a month ago that her delegates needed a "catharsis," surely she had to be laying the groundwork for convention mischief. But it was never in either Clinton’s interest to sabotage Obama. Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow.
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.
Possibly, though Lieberman remains unpopular amongst American Jews. Assume though, that he does peel off enough Floridians from voting Democratic and he would be more appealing in the Sunshine State than a onetime supporter of Pat Buchanan.
Rich continues:
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Palin, I have to add, is a talented campaigner, one who may outshine, say, Dan Quayle on the trail. But that is beside the point. She was picked not because McCain felt a close match to his philosophy or personality (they barely know one another), but as a last-minute desperate reach to address a perceived breach in the Democratic Party's unity. A breach made up almost entirely from whole cloth by the media who built that narrative long beyond any semblance of true divisions. Perhaps on this level, the fog of disinformation that is reporting on the Democratic Party may have done Obama a favor in forcing his opponent to react badly. We will see in the coming weeks.
McCain is by no means Rich's only -- or even primary -- target. He goes on to forecast a time when many of the print and broadcast media outlets covering the convention won't even exist, essentially calling them myopic dinosaurs incapable of telling the truth or even with much of a purpose anymore in the wake of the internet's growth.
The Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives. Its ability to tell its story under the radar of the mainstream press in part accounts for why the Obama surge has been so often underestimated. Even now we’re uncertain of its size. The extraordinary TV viewership for Obama on Thursday night, larger than the Olympics opening ceremony, this year’s Oscars or any "American Idol" finale, may only be a count of the horses. The Obama campaign’s full reach online — for viewers as well as fund-raising and organizational networking — remains unknown.
Rich does not say that Obama's online presence, his ground game, or Thursday's unprecedented audience guarantee him the election. But in discussing Obama's online bypass of the Traditional Media for its outreach, Rich frames Obama's Change We Can Believe In not only as a change of political leadership in Washington, but also a turning of the page on the old media. The old media, he has argued many times, is John McCain's base, and perhaps McCain calculated that his Veep pick would give him a boost in this base as well as within the churches of the religious right. The portrait Rich paints is one that does not look hopeful to McCain in the weeks ahead.
Rich concludes by remarking that his parents brought him to the March on Washington 45 years ago, and that he then did not imagine that an African American could one day be a serious candidate for president. Pointedly, he says that the catastrophic Bush administration makes one almost nostalgic for the days when Americans could see our problems in black and white. As Candidate Obama says, however, this is a big election, and we do not have time to be distracted by small things. As August turns to September, the media and the McCain campaign seem ever smaller.
UPDATE: Thank you for recommending this diary. I feel obligated to add that we can always add to the scope of "the Obama campaign's full reach online" by registering more voters, talking to more people in our communities and on the phone, and donating money to ensure that Barack Obama, not John McCain assumes the office, and that Joe Biden, not Sarah Palin, sits a heartbeat away from the presidency for the next four years.