The village elders pass around the hymnal for everyone to sing from
Famed fossil establishment pundit David Broder wrote in the Washington Post last Sunday:
We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.
. . . What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president.
McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.
As John Amato noticed, the Post’s Chris Cillizza (in his “The Fix” blog) quickly stepped up to amplify the message, reminding everyone that Broder is “required reading for anyone who calls himself a political junkie. The Dean of the political press corps, Broder has been setting conventional wisdom in campaigns for longer than The Fix has been on earth.”
Nevertheless, the Post seems to be worried about stragglers who were out of town and didn’t check the paper over the weekend. Â And so (via Brad at Sadly, No! — I don’t go looking for this crap on my own, y’now), columnist Richard Cohen picks up the theme today, explicitly endorsing the same double standard outlined by Broder that Obama’s “reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.”
Two major op-ed pieces in three days laying out the company line that McCain can lie and double-talk as much as he wants, but only Obama’s “character” will be scrutinized. Â Did WaPo editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt give marching orders, or what?
Stumble it!
June 24th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Yeah it’s like the Shrubya campaigns, where people ‘expected’ Shrubya to blither like a Village idiot, but every Kerry pronouncement was carefully parsed for ‘code words’ and phrasings for match against the GOP smear filters.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
What, the Washington press corps is a clique-ridden high school campus, where everyone parrots what the Big Man on Campus says? Broder: the press corps Fonzie?
June 26th, 2008 at 1:35 am
If,
” We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.”
How could anybody know that,
“McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes.”
And also contrary to the first assumption, haven’t we already been saturated 24/7 in the MSM with these people for the past year? If thats not scrutiny, I don’t know what is.