Driving home today, I was listening to a repeat of Friday's Lou Dobbs on CNN. Lisa Sylvester was guest hosting, and she very aggressively attacked Barack Obama's senior economic advisor Austan Goolsbee in a manner that did Bill O'Reilly proud. This was not an "independent" or "objective" journalist attempting to find out the facts. It was someone using talking points direct from the RNC. She jumps in with this line of attack:
SYLVESTER: Now, your candidate has not put any specific details of a plan, why not? Why is he refraining from going out front and saying what he thinks on this issue?
Goolsbee responds that he does not agree, and Obama has put forth a "6-point plan." He says what Obama hasn't offered is a specific assessment of the Treasury Department's plan, because (at the time of the interview), those details were not yet available.
Attack-dog Sylvester doesn't like Goolsbee's sensibility and rushes in, snarling:
SYLVESTER: But his opponent has come up with a six-point plan. And, in fact, the McCain campaign, you heard this earlier in that sound bite in that clip, in which he's saying that Obama is essentially voting present, that he is not taking a stand on this issue.
Note how she operates from the perspective that the McCain campaign's allegation is true. Goolsbee responds:
GOOLSBEE: Yes, but the six-point plan is actually Senator Obama's and I will refer you to his speech from the day before yesterday. What Senator McCain put forward that they keep saying is a specific plan, I invite you to look on their Web site. It is literally 10 lines long. It looks like it could have come out of a fortune cookie. It is not specific. It is not a specific plan. Barack Obama's organization that he has put together, this six-point program for financial oversight...Senator McCain spent the last 26 years ripping up the rules of the road...
Sylvester interrupts him before he can injure McCain's reputation and aggressively and disbelievingly demands Goolsbee provide SPECIFICS:
SYLVESTER: I have to ask you, you know, we are hearing a lot of talk, but people want specifics. What is the plan then? You're saying that Senator Obama has a plan. What is that plan?
Goolsbee does the campaign proud; whereas other surrogates might have resorted to generalities, he begins enumerating confidently enumerating the six points. He gives Sylvester many specifics in the first point alone:
GOOLSBEE: ...Step No. 1, we must immediately put in place anyone that has access to the lender of last resort feature from the fed, the sacred insurance policy that is underwritten by the American taxpayer must be subject at all times to capital and liquidity requirements the way commercial banks were in the past. The fact that we've had investment banks running up 30, 40 to one leverage ratios, when they are going to be able to turn to the government in a moment of crisis, means that they are taking risks with the taxpayers' money and that has to be changed.
Sylvester's head is spinning as she wonders what "leverage ratios" are or what the "lender of last resort feature" might be. As Goolsbee moves on to number 2, she interrupts him again:
SYLVESTER: OK, we have just a couple of seconds here.
GOOLSBEE: Tyson...OK, I was trying to give you the specifics.
SYLVESTER: So, if you can kind of wrap up [ie, I don't really want to hear about your stupid plan.-ed.]. All right, well, Austan Goolsbee, thank you very much for your time, and we appreciate it.
Sylvester hoped to put Goolsbee on the ropes by demanding specifics of Obama's plan. She never expected he would have the specifics, and when he offered them up, she wasn't interested.
Earlier, Sylvester was much more receptive to the McCain camp's 10-sentence proposal. Compare her treatment of Goolsbee to the kid-glove treatment she gave McCain's economic advisor, Mr. John Mccain-invented-the-blackberry-Douglas Holtz-Eakin:
SYLVESTER: Whoever is elected the next president will have to deal with this crisis squarely. What type of regulations will we see coming out of a McCain administration so that we are not in the same situation down the road [not, "McCain has always been against regulation. Why should we believe he wants to regulate the financial industry now?-ed.]
It was like Jekyll and Hyde. Holtz-Eakin never does offer a single specific on McCain's supposed plan. Instead, he resorts to rhetoric about golden parachutes and "making sure the system has stability."
How does the McCain camp get away with pretending this constitutes a plan? It's like asking a doctor "How do you plan to treat the patient's appendicitis?" and the doctor answers "Appendicitis is bad. I will relieve her pain and make sure she does not get any sicker."
Is there any patient this type of response would satisfy?