| "I've got to go to the spin room," she said, raising a warding hand with haughty languor. She sauntered off with her entourage, surveilled the back section of the room for a scosh, and then headed off to be spun. Well.
I wonder what Maureen Dowd would write about someone who acted like that towards her?
(For contrast, I also didn't get to ask Candy Crowley even a single question. But that's because she was intently working the whole time I was anywhere near her, barely noticing anyone at all who wasn't staffed with her. When I have the look on my face that she did, I can't stand being interrupted, so I didn't interrupt her. And I don't feel snubbed in the slightest thereby.)
Then there was Bobbi Booker, a lifestyle reporter with The Philadelphia Tribune, who said the debate was "boring as sh*t" and that she couldn't "figure out what the photographers [there in the filing center] were doing besides taking pictures of the monitors." Still, she allowed that the hundreds of credentialed press were probably a good thing for the city, the Constitution Center, and likely a good sign for the state of the campaign.
I asked Booker why she thought the Rev. Wright's controversial comments, which happened to be his quotation of a (White) fmr. ambassador to Iraq, were a big deal, but no one was talking about Pastor John Hagee, an anti-Semitic (in the fullest sense) homobigot who's endorsed John McCain. She said it was "no wonder people are hung up on Wright, look who's here." She gestured towards the mostly White press corps.
Booker said there were probably not many more than four to five Black media outlets credentialed to cover the event, in addition to a man she pointed to on radio row whom she said represented a couple of Black radio stations. While she said that it was good to see more women and a sense of diversity, that this was a shame in a city that was home to many media firsts, and the founding of the local group that later started the National Association of Black Journalists.
What I Want To Know ...
Which brings up more questions for me: Why should Maureen Dowd, whose own meticulously coiffed and dyed locks seem to have been airbrushed directly into reality by some fashion photography genius (seriously, her hair is surreal in its perfection,) have ever been allowed to make a national political issue out of John Edwards' hair? And why, by contrast, shouldn't her job be given instead to a real lifestyle reporter like Booker, who still manages to care about nontrivial issues and had a reasonable, human reaction to last night's festival of horrors?
Spin!
Anyway, I went down to check out this spin room of which all were so enamored. It was the quietest milling crowd of that size I'd ever been in, with very few people talking at any one time.
Though it was not by any means a passive crowd. When I upload my pictures later, I'll show you what you had to be willing to elbow your way into in order to talk to Rep. Patrick Murphy (PA-08), who was there representing Obama.
I don't have anything against Murphy, but what I heard him say directly to no less than two different interviewers (not me, I was insufficiently pushy) summed up exactly why I haven't really been able to get excited about the Obama campaign. "People are tired of partisan politics," he said. Really?
After a debate in which the main questions were, as Bowers paraphrased, 'why do you hate America' and 'why are you such a liar,' and after the worst presidency in our nation's history, in addition to all our war-related, economic and social woes, what the public is really outraged about is the partisan politics. Still not buying that one.
When I walked up to Rep. Chaka Fattah (PA-02), he was expressing his disapproval of the way only a few minutes were set aside for real issues when twenty thousand Pennsylvania residents had recently lost their homes to foreclosure. I asked him the Rev. Wright question, and he said it was "because we're not running against McCain yet, ... and the media likes to get focused on distractions."
Then I got to talk to Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director. I asked him why, after Clinton had been coming out so strongly earlier in the campaign against Republicans, she wasn't going after McCain on Hagee, either. It's still the primary, he said, so the candidates are mostly talking about what they'd do as president and each other; it hadn't moved to the general election yet.
Wolfson also said in comments to other reporters that there were issues the campaign had wanted to talk about but didn't get to. I heard him specifically cite education and the environment twice. The inclusion of education in his rather clipped comments made perfect sense when Beeton later said that Clinton's statements on No Child Left Behind, specifically, that she'd end it, drew some of her biggest applause lines aside from attacks on Republicans.
Something To Hold Them To
I tried to ask Howard Fineman a question and he said not right then. But then he, probably an order of magnitude more respectable and influential by establishment standards than Maureen Dowd, went out of his way to walk over to me later so I could ask him something if I wanted.
(I hope these personal impressions and whatnot are tolerable, they might not be especially newsworthy. [She says, after the national 'coffee v orange juice' debate.] Just that they're the sorts of things that people in a media environment will experience and be influenced by anyway, but won't tell you about.)
I asked him about why McCain wasn't getting grilled by the media on Hagee like Obama was on Wright. So, from Howard Fineman himself, this is the word on that:
"They will talk about that later on in the campaign. ... Hagee will come up and McCain will have to defend it." Fineman said that it was because we were still in a primary (where had I heard that before) and that it hadn't moved to the general election yet.
Does that mean that if it were the Republican primary that was still going on, and the Democrats who'd settled on Obama as nominee, that McCain would be getting questioned about Hagee and everyone would hold off asking Obama about Wright until the general election?
Yeah, I don't think so, either. Though no less an authority on what his profession will do than Fineman has now insisted on record that eventually the press will get around to scrutinizing McCain's choice in associates.
The Big Finish
We got in a cab after the debate and the driver wanted to talk politics.
He said that "Bush is the greatest leader in history" because he'd "committed more crimes than you can think of," and yet the 400 and some congressmen and 100 Senators still did whatever he wanted. Even in spite of our economic problems, the $9.5 bn we spend in Iraq every month, and the fact that gas is now nearly $5 a gallon.
It was a good argument, well reasoned.
Can we let that guy ask the questions at the next debate?
Update: My MoDo account now has eyewitness backup. Heh. |
