ReadabilityYou mean 2008 Wasn't Sarah Palin's fault?
Today on Morning Joe Nicole Wallace was sitting in with Joe Scarborough & company (sans Mika) and the subject of President Obama’s statement concerning the “private sector is doing fine”.
Plenty of people have hit the president on this but there was an interesting twist on the subject today beginning with the opening.
The Show started with John McCain’s “The fundamentals of the economy are sound” statement with the Obama commercial that followed. Then then showed the president’s gaffe and Romney’s ad that followed. Joe, Nichole Wallace Steve Rattner and Mark Halperin started discussing it and comparing it to the McCain situation
As then talked about the mistake Joe Scarborough said something that someone like myself would not find incredible, but to people on MSNBC would have been a shock.
Scarborough noted that John McCain and Sarah Palin were riding high until that gaffe. He made the point that the public after that point got the idea McCain had no idea what to do about the economy and he never recovered. Everyone at the table agreed.
While I would suggest the “suspension” of the campaign was more important, this was a watershed moment for MSNBC.
Even with Nichole Wallace at the table (who I will refrain from tweaking further as she is expecting) nobody a the table interrupted to say anything like: Well that gaffe was bad but the real problem with the campaign was Sarah Palin
Nope, not a peep, not a sound, suddenly the actual reality of the situation was put before MSNBC viewers.
Now if Palin had been the nominee I’m sure it would have played differently but for at least one morning MSNBC and its viewer heard something that they hadn’t heard before: that John McCain’s defeat was not due to Sarah Palin, but was due to his own mistakes.
It’s a start.
Exit question: If Mika was on set would they have hit Palin?
Update: Delayed reaction instalanche as I was away from my pc for a bit, thanks Glenn, don’t forget to check out my advice to the Romney Campaign invoking Braxton Bragg and my advice to the Kimberlin & Co crowd invoking Robert Stacy McCain.
Today on Morning Joe Nicole Wallace was sitting in with Joe Scarborough & company (sans Mika) and the subject of President Obama’s statement concerning the “private sector is doing fine”.
Plenty of people have hit the president on this but there was an interesting twist on the subject today beginning with the opening.
The Show started with John McCain’s “The fundamentals of the economy are sound” statement with the Obama commercial that followed. Then then showed the president’s gaffe and Romney’s ad that followed. Joe, Nichole Wallace Steve Rattner and Mark Halperin started discussing it and comparing it to the McCain situation
As then talked about the mistake Joe Scarborough said something that someone like myself would not find incredible, but to people on MSNBC would have been a shock.
Scarborough noted that John McCain and Sarah Palin were riding high until that gaffe. He made the point that the public after that point got the idea McCain had no idea what to do about the economy and he never recovered. Everyone at the table agreed.
While I would suggest the “suspension” of the campaign was more important, this was a watershed moment for MSNBC.
Even with Nichole Wallace at the table (who I will refrain from tweaking further as she is expecting) nobody a the table interrupted to say anything like: Well that gaffe was bad but the real problem with the campaign was Sarah Palin
Nope, not a peep, not a sound, suddenly the actual reality of the situation was put before MSNBC viewers.
Now if Palin had been the nominee I’m sure it would have played differently but for at least one morning MSNBC and its viewer heard something that they hadn’t heard before: that John McCain’s defeat was not due to Sarah Palin, but was due to his own mistakes.
It’s a start.
Exit question: If Mika was on set would they have hit Palin?
Update: Delayed reaction instalanche as I was away from my pc for a bit, thanks Glenn, don’t forget to check out my advice to the Romney Campaign invoking Braxton Bragg and my advice to the Kimberlin & Co crowd invoking Robert Stacy McCain.
[...] [...]
Was McCain that bad he hired Operatives that were from the Obama camp. Or were they just traitors. Sarah knew what Nicole was doing. In time the truth always comes out. Who would ever want to use them again for politics. When the election was over they should have been tar and feather and run out of town. Did you do the same thing when you worked for the Bushs. The only place I can see would hire you would be MSNBC.
I’m going to reserve judgement on the notion that Palin so botched her interviews with Couric and other Democrat-voting journalists until I see the raw, unedited footage.
In light of the recent malfeasance by NBC regarding the Zimmerman 911 call creative editing, and of course a thousand other instances of left-leaning media malpractice, I suspect those interviews were chopped up and remixed with glee by those bitter partisans to put her in the worst possible light. They must have hated Palin with a red hot passion at that point in time.
[...] 24 hours after MSNBC viewers where shocked to learn that John McCain’s gaffe’s concerning the economy and NOT the selection… Joe Scarborough and company slipped back into standard MSNBC [...]
[...] It’s a start… [...]
So this is where Nicole Wallace ended up.
Right along side Steve Schmidt..
Progressives really do reward their loyal.
The guy above said it best. It was Bush fatigue and that was the primary reason no Republican had a real shot. The media started with day 1 on Bush, just like they will on Romney come January 20, 2013.
For those of you who think Palin was a “mistake,” please see the poll numbers AFTER her selection. McCain went over Obama for the first time & only time. It was only AFTER the financial collapse, and the dumb decision by Steve Schmidt to halt the campaign and head to DC.
Palin was indeed, the ONLY thing McCain did right. For those of you who believe otherwise, I suggest you get to know the man who told you that Palin was responsible. He’s friends with the Obama administration and he’s also covering his own backside.
http://conservatives4palin.com/2012/06/no-surprise-steve-schmidt-now-buddies-with-the-obama-administration.html
“Exit question: If Mika was on set would they have hit Palin?”
Of course they would. Palin is so much better looking that Mika that protocol demands it.
Re: Mika: Depends what the White House notes for the day said to say.
Wish you wouldn’t call this a gaffe. It wasn’t a mistake. Obama meant exactly what he said, and explained at length that we needed to bulk up the public sector (that is, spend more) to put the economy right. He is certainly wrong, but that is exactly what he thinks.
McCain made multiple missteps in his 2008 campaign; Palin was just one and “The fundamentals of the economy are sound” was just another.
Palin was no mistake, She was the only reason why he led at any time of the election season
Palin was a horrible candidate. That’s not to say she was a horrible governor or person, just a bad candidate and a net negative for the campaign.
Palin would have been a much better candidate (as it was, she out-shown McCain at many levels) if not for the “handling” of staffers such as Nichole Wallace.
That’s partly true. If you look at the polls in August 2008, McCain steadily caught up to Obama, mainly thanks to Steve Schmidt’s celebrity commercials about Obama. Then Palin put him solidly over the top. In any case, I agree that Palin improved rather than hurt McCain’s chances.
McCain’s restrictions on Palin, McCain’s attitude of appeasement toward the media and the Left generally, his refusal to educate the public about Obama’s record as a state and U.S. senator (in particular, Obama’s anti-gun, pro-infanticide record as a state senator), and his general haplessness as the head of a campaign (e.g., hiring Steve Schmidt to replace Rick Davis but not firing Davis), all doomed the campaign.
Palin was the only thing John McCain did right.
Palin a mistake? Those are fighting words.
The mistake was McCain’s general clueless approach to running for President and how economies work much outside the Beltway, plus his staff’s inability to understand what they had in Sarah. Downhill from there.
If Palin was such a horrible candidate, how did McCain’s campaign go from moribund to shooting into the lead soon after she was named as his running mate? That’s the problem with revisionist history on the internet age: we can check, and call out all such nonsense.
Sarah Palin electrified the presidential ticket, despite a hostile media who distorted Palin’s positions and beliefs beyond recognition.
In Pew’s exit poll in 2008, voters who said Palin was a factor in their vote went for McCain by a 56-43 margin.
Palin was a mixed blessing. At first she helped rally the based, and helped significantly. But later, after some of the MSM interviewers started dinging her, she might have cost McCain some independent votes, because of the perception she was not up to the job. But I definitely agree that she was not the primary problem for McCain, his own mistakes were, especially his “the economy is sound” statement, his self censoring of his own people when he disowned the attacks on Obamas radical background, and even worse when he suspended his campaign to play phony “statesman”. In any event, the country was suffering from Bush fatigue, and the repub brand was tarnished, so he would have had trouble anyway.
Don’t know about Mika, but if they had had MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt on the panel he would have probably pulled down a light fixture and beaten Scarborough with it for suggesting anything but Palin’s presence (and especially the flawed thinking of the campaign manager) caused McCain to lose.
Exactly! He’s spent a lot of time selling that lie of bull. HBO helped him out, and the media too of course. And then his own friends and MSNBC colleagues forgot. Whoops!
This sequence was what made me realize that Barack Obama was going to be a bad president. Of course, when John McCain suspended his campaign, he didn’t know what to do about the unfolding economic crisis, but he at least understood that a disaster was happening and felt the need to focus on the crisis, even if it hurt his Presidential campaign.
Of course, he was right. The economic disaster unfolding resulted in a four year recession with no end in sight. Even if McCain didn’t know what he was going to do, he rightly sensed that addressing it was more important than campaigning.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, looked like the cat that had just eaten the bird. He was way too cool about it, which said to me that either he had no idea of the seriousness of what was going on, or even worse, that he wasn’t fazed because he knew what was happening in advance. In either case, it was the first instance of Barack Obama playing national misfortune to his personal advantage, a pattern that has continued through his entire Presidency.
You can’t say that the American people weren’t warned because we all saw his opportunism and calculation manifest itself then and there, before the election.