OK, so we all know that the presidential race is between the tickets of Barack Obama & Joe Biden, on the Republican side, and John McCain & Sarah Palin on the Democratic side. Right? Well, sure, but there's more to it than that.
TCG believes that the real contest is between McCain-Palin, on the one hand--and the press, on the other. And many Americans seem, instinctively, to agree. This story by Joseph Curl, from today's Washington Times, headlined, "Small-town residents boo media with McCain," is a reminder that ordinary folks don't much like the media,
And the cartoon, above, captures the same truth. (Strangely enough, the MSM don't seem to have picked up on this news!)
The truth, of course, is that the Republicans have been running against the media for half a century or more--it's just that Republicans don't always know it. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew knew it, and it worked pretty well for them, as they ripped into "nattering nabobs of negativism" in the run-up to the 1972 election. (Yes, scandals engulfed both men soon thereafter, much to the delight of the media, but the subsequent fate of Nixon and Agnew doesn't change the reality that they won in a landslide by attacking the media.
And now, the McCain-Palin ticket is doing it. It's a high-risk strategy, because the media do have real power. But the payoff for the strategy could be a huge GOP landslide.
Because with apologies to the late great Marshal McLuhan, the medium isn't the message, the medium is the messenger. The medium is the messenger of liberalism, and people don't like it.
