(photo: photosan0)
Yesterday I suggested that it was unwise for Obama to have titled and predicated a video on a line from a rather slanted New York Times editorial, given the growing public perception of media bias in his favor. But he has now built an entire microsite and subcampaign on the title of that editorial, which was and is called the “Low-Road Express” (Times editorial | Obama campaign microsite). It’s a natural question to ask which preceded which in authorship, or whether this sort of thing is now coordinated, or just the inadvertent consonance of devoted admirers.
The phrase itself is fourteen hours old in penetrating the leftblogs and is doing well. Ironically enough it was a pro-McCain blog (citing the Times) that can claim inauguration of the trend.
On yesterday’s matter, Mick Stockinger takes my observation to a more logical conclusion. Noting the NYT/campaign message interchangability in the new Obama ad, he essentially argues that what’s missing is more important than what’s there. Obama, says Mick, didn’t really have a response to McCain’s allegations and the ad basically submits: “the New York Times dissents and you should rely upon its reputation”, which is a plainly fatuous proposition I would agree. For Mick, the ad thus becomes useless noise, as a bottle without a message is mere litter in the sea.
While there’s something to that, I think it’s not entirely correct that Obama offered no refutation of the criticism, as the second part of the ad does highlight Obama’s tax and energy plans briefly. The purpose there being to suggest that the possession of an agenda negates a charge of vacuity (an arguable point). That coupled with the insinuation that McCain’s “old politics” represents a kind of elegiac experience, does offer a type of response to being labeled an empty celebrity, if only in an indirect way.
For my own money it would have been more persausive to put Obama on the screen for thirty seconds, talking briefly about how his work in urban community efforts persuaded him to enter national politics for higher purposes. We might criticize that, but it would remind us that it wasn’t the attention of the New York Times that put him in the arena at least.
Here the Obama campaign might be making the mistake of thinking that since Obama has been giving speeches for two years almost exclusively on his higher motives in politics (and in fact has been criticized strenuously for that), his purposes have been established. But the efficacy of the McCain criticism suggests that they have not. The notion that Obama is propelled to a large degree by media advocacy and the pursuit of it, is something that Obama is uniquely vulnerable to as a young and relatively inexperienced Democrat.
It wouldn’t be unwise to have taken the opportunity to communicate that there was a motivating factor behind him that transcended all that uncomfortable praise from Eighth Avenue. Transforming media messages into campaign themes, as he is doing with the ‘Low-Road Express,’ isn’t a step in the right direction in my view.