By Steve Rhodes
A periodical look at the decreasing number of periodicals laying around Beachwood HQ.
By the end of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden – not Sarah Palin – had become the gaffe-prone vice-presidential candidate hidden out of sight for fear that he would capsize the top of the ticket.
His gaffes weren’t surprising; he’s made a career of making them despite his enormous intelligence and political skill. In part, his mouth and his past as a lying plagiarist led the media to mostly dismiss Biden as a joke when he was running for president early in the campaign. The minute he was selected as Barack Obama’s running mate, however, Biden was transformed; suddenly he was the wise foreign policy guru and old Washington hand who would add ballast to Obama’s light resume.
And suddenly – thanks to the dark hand of David Axelrod – he was a working-class kid from Scranton, not the elegant senator from Delaware with exquisite tastes and hair plugs.
“Although Obama seems to have chosen Biden partly because of his legislative experience, the campaign introduced him by emphasizing his biography – a moving story,” the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza wrote in “Biden’s Brief,” which appeared in the magazine’s October 20 edition.
The emphasis on Biden’s biography wasn’t surprising; even while Obamaphiles were slamming the McCain campaign after an official said the race wasn’t about issues, the Obama campaign was hewing to its strategy of making the race about personalities and not issues.
In Biden’s case, there was a large obstacle to overcome. “He left the 1988 Presidential race branded a plagiarist and a dissembler,” Lizza noted. Curiously, the Keating Five found its way into this campaign, but not Joe Biden’s problems telling the truth.
Partly that’s because Biden is sort of lovable, if not grating. Certainly I’ve expressed positive thoughts about him here. But that’s still no excuse; the media, as usual, did not do its job. Somehow, Biden’s lengthy record wasn’t as worthy of examination as Palin’s wardrobe.
“On some days, only a single print reporter is covering Biden,” Lizza reported, “and weekly studies by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism note that Biden was the subject of between two and six percent of all stories each week in September. (Palin was the focus of between fifteen and sixty percent of a week’s worth of news in that same period.) Pew has noted that Biden is ‘the virtually forgotten candidate,’ someone who ‘has consistently been in afterthought in the coverage’.”
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The law school at Syracuse University bought a full-page ad in the New York Times on Friday touting its famous grad. But the school didn’t like him so much when he was actually a student there.
Purple Palin
“As governor, Palin has done nothing to impose her religious or social views,” Philip Gourevitch reported in the New Yorker. “Alaska has no death penalty, and during the campaign she said that she would support one, but never made an issue of it.”
(Obama supports the death penalty, and says his opposition to gay marriage is informed by his religious views.)
“She opposed abortion even for pregnancies caused by rape, but this was a personal opinion, not a legislative cause. In fact, she refused requests to put abortion bills on the agenda during a special legislative session this summer, preferring to discuss the natural-gas pipeline, which she pursued in such a bipartisan manner that she ultimately won more solid support for it from Democrats than from Republicans.”
Interestingly, the majority of Alaskans hold no party affiliation; 25 percent are registered Republicans, 15 percent are registered Democrats, and 3 percent belong to the Alaska Independence Party. Partisanship isn’t big in the state’s political culture – and wasn’t Palin’s thing before becoming the vice presidential nominee.
Her rhetoric about change was nothing new, as Gourevitch reported in another issue.
“The theme of our [gubernatorial] campaign was ‘new energy’,” she told Gourevitch. “It was no more status quo, no more politics as usual, it was all about change. So then to see that Obama – literally, part of his campaign uses those themes, even new energy, change, all that, I think, O.K., well, we were a little bit ahead on that.”
I wouldn’t go that far; Obama’s been talking about change forever – as have many pols. But Palin also thought it was “neat” that Obama was doing relatively well in the polls in Alaska because it indicated that Alaskans were interested in shaking up the status quo – as was Palin.
“Turning purple in the state means, to me, it’s more independent, it’s not the obsessive partisanship that gets in the way of doing what’s right for this state, and I think on a national level that’s what we’re gonna see, Palin said.
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When the Obama campaign was trying to game out who John McCain would pick as his running mate, Sarah Palin was indeed on their short list, according to Newsweek reporters speaking on a panel about their special election project. Never in the top five, and not whom they thought would be the ultimate choice, but on the list as a legitimate contender.
The Enemy Is Us
“When you fight monsters, be careful that in the process you do not become one.”
Liberals were fond of saying this about America’s post-9/11 security state and particularly when it came to issues like torture. I would apply it to political campaigns as well.
Text File
“Texting may be using a new technology, but its linguistic processes are centuries old,” says David Crystal, author of Txting: The Gr8 Deb8 (sigh), tells Louis Menand.
But all you really need to know is this:
~(_8^(|)
It’s Homer Simpson.
Tipping Point
“Eighty percent of Americas say they prefer tipping to paying a service fee, according to Zagat Survey,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine reported last month. “They do so, Leo Crespi’s surveys first demonstrated, primarily because they believe tipping provides an incentive for good service. But there is little correlation, in fact – less than 2 percent, according to Michael Lynn, a Cornell professor of consumer behavior and marketing.”
Posted on November 10, 2008