The Clintons’ re-emergence into political storylines last week reversed John McCain’s temporary catch of Barack Obama in news coverage, according to newly-released Pew findings.
The fluctuation in coverage of McCain compared to the steadiness in coverage of Obama mirrors the complaint from Republican corners that McCain’s team has been reactive and struggled to provide a clear and consistent message beyond “Don’t vote for Obama.”
The level of McCain's media attention undulates with the traction of any specific way McCain articulates that core argument. Spears-Hilton gained McCain more attention because it was a surprising and original angle for attacking Obama. But the upshot remains: McCain is dependent on Obama for his messaging; Obama’s messaging is independent. Notice how flat the line is for Obama coverage. McCain’s line is all over the graph. That’s a strong statistical signal McCain’s message team is not in full control.
Notice the Boston Globe's recent visual depiction of the different most prominently featured words on each candidate’s official blogs.
Little wonder that stories about McCain are more easily pushed aside; McCain’s own stories are mostly about Obama; McCain gets more attention by attacking in unexpected ways – Spears-Hilton Week was unusual and so the "Look what McCain’s doing!" and "What is McCain thinking with this?” stories led to his tying Obama that week in news coverage.
But unless and until John McCain can consistently drive a message untethered to Barack Obama, expect to see the news coverage graph to stay the same – a stable Obama line and a zigzagging McCain line.
8.12.2008
Spears-Hilton Week Over, McCain's News Coverage Falls Again
@ 4:34 PM
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57 comments
Can't wait for the Republicans to start screaming "MEDIA BIAS!" all over the comment board for this post...
That's a really interesting graphic by the Boston Globe. Republicans can bash this all they want, but they can't deny the TRUTH of it.
Why do you think they are continuing the "vaccuous celebrity meme" it actually garnered McCain more hits than Obama. It gets views so you do what works.
Well really, McCain is nothing new. You know what you are getting and he really doesn't offer too much of a challenge for Americans. They understand all the old ideas already. Why write about it?
This trend should continue until November unless McCain hits the 'implode' button in frustration.
McCain campaign sunk to new low today
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/08/hot-chick-dig-o.html
Surely this has to backfire. McCain is looking like the one with nothing to say, no substance, pathologically negative
Does McCain's name appear anywhere in his own blog's world pile? I certainly can't find it. Hilarious.
someperson718 said "Why do you think they are continuing the 'vaccuous celebrity meme' it actually garnered McCain more hits than Obama. It gets views so you do what works."
It only garners attention while it is a fresh attack.
Sean's point, reinforced by the Pew findings, is that this meme has finished drawing attention. Further, it is in keeping with McCain's failure to articulate a message about himself which gains any traction; this may be a way to provide a message to the base, but it does not have much reach outside the base, other than the temporary bump this message provided when it was first issued.
Reading this site shows me how smart people think.
Then I feel dumb. :(
I've gotta say Obama is finally getting some effective negative ads. "Embrace" was a good one.
Blogger.com ate my comment, so briefly:
Excellent, most excellent, Sean. As it stands, McCain gains more from promoting Obama than he does from showing his true colors. While his loyalists stand by their man, others would be pretty horrified if they heard his actual positions and his inept and incompetent handling of challenge to his positions, his inability to speak to issues without bumbling, etc.
Someone on The Field posted recently about how, when refuting an attack, mentioning the substance of the attack in the refutation only serves to cancel the effect of the refutation. The repetition basically reinforces the attack. But for now McCain has only to gain from hiding beyond the lies and insinuations.
Wouldn't it be great to see this as a background graphic every time a talking head reports on McCain's media bias complaints?
"Does McCain's name appear anywhere in his own blog's world pile? I certainly can't find it. Hilarious."
I saw the cloud somewhere else that was slightly differently formatted, and it was at the very top right, in one of the smallest font sizes. Looked to be out of the top 100 words.
But I mean, that's the correct strategy for him. Realistically his only chance to win is to make the election entirely a referendum on Obama.
Sen.McCain really has only himself to blame for a lot of the media coverage of Sen.Obama. Since so much of his own messaging is ABOUT Obama (rather than himself), he's almost forcing them to talk more about Obama than himself.
Basically, when McCain talks a lot about Obama, coverage of McCain goes up. When Obama's not around, McCain's coverage goes up. As soon as something more interesting comes along (like a rock painted green), the media coverage moves on and McCain's campaign is left wondering why it's hearing crickets.
@Diggsb - I think I finally found Sen.McCain's name in the picture. It's in light gray, on the far left, below the big "CANCELLED" and right above the "S" in "COST". It's tilted 90 degrees to vertical.
I had to zoom in to 200% to be able to make it out, and even then it's a bit blurry it's been blown up so much.
McCain is running a highly competent campaign.
This is all he's got and he knows it. He's doing exactly the only thing that has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting him elected.
His only chance is to screech "don't vote for Obama", keep his own policy proposals virtually secret, and pray that some "Black-guy-image-right-before-white -chick-image" ad gets him 271 EV's from Viagra users and the Toby Keith fans who don't realize that the old guy in that video is Willie Nelson. (No offense to more enlightened viagra users or Toby Keith fans is intended.)
He can't talk about issues or policies because he Bushified himself to convince the wingnuts to support him in the primary.
That lack of coverage of McCain IS a pro-McCain bias. His platform is unpopular, so they shut the hell up about it and print "War Hero McCain Warns Against Obama" stories.
McCain was always a right winger, but up until 2007, he was a borderline sane right winger. That McCain would have indulged in dumb right wing economic policies that backfire and phoney "anti-abortion" posturing domestically, but could have gotten along with the rest of the world and avoided disaster. That McCain had a chance.
The new McCain has promised the wingnuts that, not only will he not back the ship away from the iceberg, he'll chug toward it just as fast as Bush would. His only hope is to attack Obama and pray that they don't ask what he supports (or vote for Barr or Nader).
I tried rerunning Wordle (using http://www.johnmccain.com/McCainReport/, which i assume is the blog in question).
McCain seems to be about half the size of Obama. John is slightly bigger, either because of informal speech, or because it feeds on John Edwards as well.
I hope we get to read the McCain emails after he loses the election due to having nothing to say and having no ability to manage a campaign.
vc,
Yeah, I was surprised he went for that line to be honest. It's an interesting reversal of the usual campaign dynamic of Obama action, McCain reaction.
The main difference between the ads (other than the fact that McCain's was first and thus got more media coverage) is that Obama seems to have embraced the concept of sticking with repetitive negative images as well as words. The scenes of McCain on talk shows are not very powerful, but you can tell they wanted to make a point of showing him embracing and supporting Bush as many times as possible.
I suppose we'll see if that investment in negative imaging pays off a few months from now. But McCain has done a very good job of keeping the attention off of him and his policies.
Well this word pile of the most used words on their blogs is missing one key element.
You see that the word OBAMA is used quite often... but they left out the most common word that would most likely follow it.
I don't see SUCKS anywhere in there.
If you can't post anything intelligent, don't bother posting at all. Please.
Wow, that Globe depiction is a truly pathetic picture for McCain. Notice how his own name doesn't even show up, and Obama's apparently shows up even more than on Obama's own site (at least, it's bigger on the depiction). That's so pathetic it almost makes me feel sorry for him. Maybe he's going for the pity vote.
Being in the news more is not the same as getting more positive press. A lot of the new stories about Obama are slightly to heavily negative in tone or focus. I'm talking about the MSM that are supposed to be unbiased news. Is there any data on this? My wife and I have all but give up listening to NPR which seems to have may more comments and interviews from people on the right versus the left. I believe someone has some data to support this view specifically about NPR.
Proof positive that a McCain sentence includes a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama.
Oh what's the matter Adam?
I'm sure if Bill Mahr came in here and threw up some zingers you would say... "WOW! What an intelligent guy!"
Oh come on Dan... you don't have to steal a line from Biden do you?
Originality man! You're taking lessons from Obama who stole his entire platform from other people.
YES WE CAN!
Darien, you're singlehandedly lowering the quality of commentary on this board through your drivel. Clean it up, or stop posting here.
Now break that chart up by "positive coverage" and "negative coverage." and obama's steady coverage won't look so good anymore.
Adam said: "Realistically his only chance to win is to make the election entirely a referendum on Obama."
I dunno, the "I'm the opposite of _other candidate_" strategy isn't the safest one when you're dealing with someone with the level of popularity Obama is enjoying. Not to mention that means McCain's campaign strategy would be entirely reactive, not proactive.
I can't come up with much that McCain could do, though, that's the problem. His "Right kind of change" campaign message last month seemed to do well in both playing down Obama's own "change" message, and assuring folks leaning Right that McCain is still maverick enough to be of benefit to the US as president.
Cutting him off from reporters now isn't going to help anyone, that's for sure. It assures that less spin-doctoring of his mistakes are needed, but McCain's asset seems to be his quirky, down-homey personality, and cutting reporters off from that isn't going to help the campaign much, IMO.
Adam don't you remember?
I'm going to be here on election night where I will say... "You know Adam you were right the whole time and I should have listened to your devine wisdom"
Or I will see absolute SILENCE on this board... because you lefties never take a loss like men.
Well, I think if there's one thing any two partisans can agree on, it's that the tabloid crap that passes for American news coverage is an embarrassment, whether we're talking Blitzer, Olbermann, or Hannity.
Thank God for the News Hour!
Yes Ape! I agree! :)
Have you seen the new McCain attack ad? It looks like his campaign is being run by Dumb and Dumber. More of the "Obama's an empty suit" theme, but sort of a montage with a whacky laugh soundtrack, kind of like "America's stupidest pet tricks" gone very bad.
Instead of LOWERING expectations ahead of the debates, McCain should be RAISING them! He should be saying, just as Bush advisers did prior to the debate, that Obama is an experienced debater and they hoped McCain would be able to hold his own with him. Tamp down expectations so that if McCain doesn't drool into a cup or fall asleep in his chair, they can spin it as a win.
McCain is utterly doomed if he continues with this line of attack, because Obama is going to show up in the debates and any low-information voter who watches him for 10 seconds is going to realize "this guy's really smart and he knows what he's talking about."
There's just NO chance that McCain is going to be able to make Obama look stupid in a debate, or an "empty suit" or a "vacuous celebrity."
These attacks are aimed solely and exclusively at Republicans. Because anybody who might consider actually voting for Obama will listen to him.
And when they do it will be instantly discernable that Obama is one of the smartest men ever to run for President of the U.S.
If this is really the best McCain's got he's dead meat. It's tough to prove you're not a "flip-flopper" in a debate, but it's no trick at all for a brilliant man, a former Harvard Law Review Editor and Constitutional Law Professor to show he's smart. A lot smarter than John McCain is in fact.
McCain's new ad is worse than a late-night car ad. It's obvious he has no intention of airing it, it's 1:05 seconds long! If they seriously intended to use this it would be 30 seconds like all the other ads.
It's just part of their media strategy to get the idiot reporters talking about it.
He'd do a lot better going back to the "elitist" theme. That one might be stupid, but a lot of voters are stupid, and they might not like voting for a guy so obviously intelligent as Obama, so they might buy it.
I agree. The elitist angle was also more compatible with the argument that Obama is "out of touch" and "too liberal". Obama WANTS to be a populist; he WANTS to draw huge crowds; he WANTS every American who watches the news to know each of his soundbites ("Hope! Change! Unity! Dignity! A new kind of politics!") by heart. By "attacking" that, McCain is inviting return fire on the order of, "Well, Senator, why is Barack Obama such a 'celebrity' and you such a media dud?"
Actually, if McCain coupled the "celebrity" attacks with a quick-and-dirty run-through of Obama's positions and how they clash with popular opinion or basic fact, he could portray him as being both out of touch and popular for all the wrong reasons. Sort of a "do you know the REAL Barack [Hussein] Obama?" approach. (Though something tells me the 427s are going to be covering that ground pretty thoroughly in a month or so.)
Darien, there's an old saw you'd profit by. It suggests that it's better to remain silent than to speak and remove the doubt that you're a complete fool.
Claiming divinity, but being incapable of spelling the word is pretty suggestive....
I heard a story on NPR the other day and they mentioned that McCain was giving a speech where he mentioned Obama less. They were contrasting it with earlier speeches, where most of the time was spent on Obama. Perhaps the McCain camp is learning: If all you do is talk about your opponent, you make them the story.
For a brief moment of levity, may I suggest creating your own Wordle of prolific posters on this site. Pretty funny as some posters are quite adept at hitting the same words over and over again, regardless of the topic they are posting on.
http://wordle.net/create
It's interesting that the word "canceled" is so common on McCain's campaign blog. Is this referring to his campaign events, or...?
It seems the McCain campaign chose to make this election a referendum on Obama. They could have avoided it and made their own kind of narrative, with a little less media attention. Instead, they bought the attention for the price of losing message control. It´s all in Obama´s hands at the moment. If he doesn´t mess it up, McCain can´t win (it´s just what the polls show). The focus on Obama also serves as a decoy to hide the connections between McCain and Bush.
This strategy however is going to lose power over time. The more stature Obama gains, the less impact is any campaign error going to have. The more people actually know about Obama the less doubt can exist. So McCain could be forced to abruptly change his strategy. Maybe he should have put more focus on building his own message BEFORE he started attacking Obama.
Hey Ogre... fitting name... just pointing out that you called yourself that... not me.
You win the spelling bee dude! ... but you lose the election. I'll be here. I promice
Darien -
What makes you so sure that a candidate from the party who has an extremely unpopular incumbent in the White House, with whom he has voted almost 95% of the time, will defeat a charismatic young populist candidate from the opposition party?
Darien:
It's "promise" not "promice." Failed 6th Grade English, huh?
Just wanted to add that this comparison is echoed in stuff I've been writing about the two conventions. The Republican Convention is shaping up to be a wonder of absenteeism and nobody is very excited by St. Paul or the expense of getting there.
McCain could have kept it interesting by not heeding his Rovian handlers and trying for some sustained common sense.
If the character of his support is what I have handily avoided reading here I would say his problems are not entirely his fault.
The McCain campaign has apparently figured out that the only way they can get in the news is to look like asses.
I guess its effective because they have landed in the news with the celebrity stuff. I'm not sure it will get them any votes though. The people want their president to talk about real issues. All I'm hearing out of McCain's mouth is Brittany Spears and Taco Bell.
Running naked through a funeral will get you talked about too. Perhaps, McCain should try that next.
This is a strategy page. So I'm going to advise the McCain campaign.
If you are going to pull a gun and fire on somebody, you better make sure its not loaded with blanks.
If the McCain campaign can find a real issue to go negative on, they should do it. The fact that a Taco Bell sold a lot of tacos before an Obama rally....
Hay FLVoter,
Eye did that on perpus you daralick
Eye just don't no what eye wood dew without all yer speling hep.
Perhaps u shood foller da conversashun than you wood not be so behind.
Just don't know what all us dumb Republicans would do without you people trying to correct us all the time. Don't you ever just want us to like you for who you are?
Gallup published a poll this afternoon in which respondents were asked to name their choice for president with no names supplied to them.
38% named McCain, 45% Obama.
Question of all you experts... does this sort of poll have more or less validity than one in whch respondents have the names provided to them?
The classic chicken-and-egg question. Is Obama in control, requiring McCain to attack him to get attention, or do McCain's attacks shift the focus to Obama?
Given how steady Obama's coverage has been, it's hard to argue that McCain's stop-start attacks are responsible, as Sean notes. It's also hard to argue that Obama's campaign is responsible due to its "independent messaging", since Obama has been alternatively off the trail or in the eye of the storm since June. Why no bump during his foreign trip? Or in the week of the Iraq policy flap? Clearly Obama's message machine is not moving the dial either.
The only way the coverage of Obama could be so steady is if the people writing the stories consistently injected his name. Call it bias if you want, but it's simply a sign that the media views the election as an up or down vote on Obama.
Just don't kid yourself that Obama is in control of the message.
It's also interesting to note:
The only McCain youtube vids that get viewed a lot are the ones about...Obama.
Leave the black bird troll alone. It's like pulling a string on a doll: one of several prerecorded phrases will get uttered:
"It should be called Election Projection Done LEFT!"
"I'll be here on election night to brag!"
"I get excited about dead civilians, as long as they have brown skin!"
Just stop pulling the string. I guarantee the level of discourse will improve.
Obama is going to show up in the debates and any low-information voter who watches him for 10 seconds is going to realize "this guy's really smart and he knows what he's talking about."
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If that's so, why has McCain been much more keen on head-to-heads than Obama?
Too many of Obama's statements have been cookie cutter. The Russia / Georgia situation is a case in point. Anti-communist leader and former Polish president, Lech Walesa, said back in February that recognizing Kosovo is going to be seized on by the Russians as an excuse for raising trouble, and sure enough it did. As soon as the Georgia crisis broke out, the Poles and eastern Europeans were unequivocal in strongly denouncing Moscow. They knew what the situation is. And McCain endorsed their statement almost immediately. Obama put out an even-handed, let's all behave responsibly statement that could have just as well come off an diplomat's shelf and been auto-applied to any conflict. The response wasn't tailored, until events on the ground moved Obama to tailor. That's called being behind the curve.
Obama's balanced POV on Russia-Georgia was apt, not cookie cutter. McCain's knee jerk reaction and Bush's initial reaction were political ploys. Anyone who knows the situation knows that Georgia's hands were not clean and that Russia is going for some respect big time. Better believe balanced makes the best sense.
Stephen C. Rose wrote:
The Republican Convention is shaping up to be a wonder of absenteeism and nobody is very excited by St. Paul or the expense of getting there.
I agree completely. There is no shortage of commenters advising us all to "wait until after the Conventions". Unless the police in St. Paul kill a few protesters, I think the RNC will be an immense snooze that fails to even engage the base, much less the nation at large. What specifically do people imagine will come out of the RNC that will change anything?
They are going to wave a million flags and talk about McCain's status as a war hero. They are going to brag about the "progress" in Iraq. They are going to promise to cut taxes. It's the same bloody stuff that they already say every day. Only now it's at a convention, so it's much more likely to influence the public. Really?
Brian Dell wrote:
If that's so, why has McCain been much more keen on head-to-heads than Obama?
McCain is "keen" on his Town Hall forums, where he can plant questioners to ask Obama about crucial issues such as "Why do you hate America so much?" and "Have you noticed you are black?".
Inexperience+Got my bodyguard now (Bidenguard)+Iran+Iraq+Afghanistan+Russian unrest+Missle Deal with Poland+Falling Gas Prices=Less focus on ecomony and more focus on threat=lack of confidence in Obama=McCain takes win in November. Obama does not stand a chance. Even if he did, Biden will botch it up further for him. Sianara!
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