hideously off target

Reading the rest of DFW's astonishingly insightful and engaging Rolling Stone article written during the McCain 2000 campaign about the McCain 2000 campaign (which i highly recommend you read, as you probably won't find any published article about campaigning that's quite as penetrating and observant as this one, not to mention that it pretty much could have been written during this campaign season—though be warned it is fairly long) has got me thinking about campaign coverage. And listening to some campaign reporting on NPR this morning, i have to ask: why does it seem nearly all of the reporting about the presidential campaign eventually is distilled into a question of how a candidate's actions will affect the polls? That is, why are our news teams guessing at their audience how their audience will react to, for instance, Palin's husband's refusal to cooperate with a subpoena or the sniping back and forth between Obama and McCain about their economic plans or knowledge (or lack thereof)? Surely the audience doesn't need to be told by the media what the media thinks that the audience might be thinking when the audience knows what they themselves are actually thinking. (Which in my case is that neither Obama nor McCain have any idea how to solve the economic mess we're in, but then neither does anyone else really, as economics seems to be based almost entirely on guesses and half-proven theories; and also the McCain 2008 campaign's claim that Palin's husband's refusal to comply with subpoena is legit because the investigation has been politicized is a crock of shit because (a) it was a politicized investigation to begin with as it deals with an accusation of gubernatorial—i.e., political—corruption; (b) the claim by the McCain campaign that it's been politicized implies that the investigation itself has become corrupt and because the McCain 2008 campaign only exists in relation to the dems (as, obviously, you can't have a democracy with only one candidate), implying the investigation has become a tool of the democratic party to make Palin and by association McCain look bad, when in fact (as I was told by NPR's Morning Edition) the investigation was initiated by Republicans and is being carried out by an investigator with a reputation of imparitality; and (c) because of (b) the McCain campaign have further politicized the investigation by implying its now part of some vendetta by the democrats to make Palin look like a hypocrite, which she is anyway, and yet they somehow managed to make the democrats look bad through the implication of a tainted investigation when in fact the McCain campaign are the ones that have fucking politicized the investigation! It's outrageous. And very, very clever. I also wonder why it is that the McCain campaign is speaking on behalf of Palin's husband, when the specific issue of the husband's non-compliance is an in-state, non-campaign issue involving a person, as far as I can tell, not officially part of the campaign.) I wish our mainstream political coverage contained some actual observation and analysis of what's really going on and not the very bland recitation of poll numbers and hideously off target guessing.

Read the article.