Watching Keith Olbermann on Countdown tonight, he made an important slip. In discussing Hillary's attacks on Obama with Howard Fineman, he conceded that Obama's reference to Reagan as a transformative figure was not a blanket endorsement of Reagan's policies. Howard Fineman did a good job of defending Obama...but then Keith f'ed up.
While conceding the Reagan point, Keith then said that Obama HAD said that the Republicans had all the "good ideas" in the 1990's. This slip - if it is one - reinforced the Clintons' deliberate mischaracterization of what Senator Obama said.
And that's what the Clintons' game is all about. Repeating something over and over until people either accept it as true, or until the brain patterns are formed and people like Keith Olbermann repeat the mistaken charge just because they are trying to form a sentence on the fly.
So while Keith is the king of nuance, and always listens carefully to what people say and what they don't say - much to my lawyer's delight - his slip up tonight is meaningful. I don't think, reading Senator Obama's remarks, you could say that Obama agrees with the Republican ideas of the 1990's - and I suspect Keith knows that. And that's why it's extremely frustrating to see someone like Keith, who gets it right so often, to make that mistake.
UPDATED Wow...no faster than I post this, but after the commercial break...Keith corrects himself. Nice work! And if you want to give me credit, I'll take it.
UPDATED II I'm going to leave this diary up because it's a record of just how impressive Keith is. He makes an error, and corrects it right when he gets back from commercial. He doesn't bury it at the end of a show two weeks later like a screw up in the WaPo. He points out the entire quote from Obama and allows the viewers to make up their own minds on an admittedly nebulous statement.
That's journalism, and it reinforces my trust in Keith.