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Halloween was over but revelers were still in costume Sunday morning. Pundits-in-chief appeared confident that they had served the American people well during their extended, peculiar process of choosing a global leader. Cheerleaders were wearing their game faces.
But strikingly, the professionals were confident in inverse proportion to their odds of success. On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, while McCain campaign manager Rick Davis affected not the slightest care in the world, Obama chief strategist David Axelrod refused to play the prophecy game. On Fox News Sunday, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe walked on stage for the first time during this campaign. The soft-spoken Plouffe has not mastered the art of braying, which probably means he cannot look forward to a long career on TV.
By contrast, William Kristol, who a few months ago called Sarah Palin âfantasticâ and his âheartthrob,â contrived a Rube Goldberg scenario that would give McCain a margin of 272 electoral votes to 268. âIâve got it worked out,â he said without shaking his grin. âIâm not sure the voters agree but itâs not implausible.â He skipped a beat. âItâs not very likely.â
Kristol, a strenuous moralist, missed a grand opportunity to cement his reputation on the most recent eruption of what might be called the morality issue. Fox News viewers were treated to a clip of Obama saying that Republicans who call a tax boost for the wealthy âsocialisticâ actually âwant to make a virtue out of selfishness.â There followed a clip of McCain chiding Obama for âview[ing] higher taxes not in economic terms but in moral terms.â Imagine the audacity required to apply moral language to the question of taxes! But none of Foxâs round tablers, normally quick to rise to moralistic heights, took the bait, or even seemed to notice. Itâs too bad George Will was busy at a different round table, for a month ago he wrote in his Washington Post column that McCain displays a âRooseveltian interest in our moral reclamation.â It would have been interesting to see him comment on McCainâs remark.
Of round tablers, ABC contributor and sometime Republican Matthew Dowd contributed the best gaffe (âJohn Cain,â he called the candidate from Arizona) and the most apt characterization of a failed campaign (âif youâre in the position of one, attacking the polls, and two, attacking the media, you know itâs a sure signal that the campaign isnât going wellâ).
Tom Brokaw did have a good, alert gotcha moment when Meet the Press showed former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger saying of Sarah Palin:
I don’t think at the moment she is prepared to take over the brains of the presidencyâŚ.Give her some time in the office, and I think the answer would be, she will be adequate. I can’t say that she would be a genius in the job, but I think she would be enough to get us through a four-yearâwell, I hope not.
(A side note on Eagleburgerâs off-message mouthiness, from which he is always forced to retreat: At a conference in November 2002, when the subject of the war build-up came up, I heard Eagleburger say that the Bush crowd were âout of their minds.â I asked him later what he meant. He insisted that he didnât mean the headlong rush to war in Iraq, but, rather, their approach to selling the war. Maybe so.)
Brokaw then put it to Fred Thompson, McCainâs surrogate:
MR. BROKAW: You have, among others, have said that she’s a victim of the liberal media, that they’ve been unfair to her in some fashion.
SEN. THOMPSON: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: What question was she asked by Charles Gibson or Katie Couric or Brian Williams, for that matter, that you thought was unfair?
SEN. THOMPSON: I don’t know, I didn’t see any of the interviews. I, I saw excerpts…
But Brokaw also had the silliest moderator moment:
I’ve been talking to a lot of voters coast to coast and in the heartland and in large citiesâthere’s a lot of concern about one party rule.
Presumably out there in the land thereâs also âa lot of concernâ about economic collapse and the fallout from eight years of divided rule when the party in charge of the presidency is Republican. It would be interesting to know whether Brokaw was equally concerned about âone party ruleâ when the one party was Republican, during the months in 2001 before Senator Jim Jeffords decided he wasnât a Republican after all.
Brokaw also displayed the most fatuous relay of pundit evasion, when he quoted David Broder, without demur, as follows, emphasis mine:
In what history may record as [Obama’s] singular achievementâdealing with the classic American dilemma of raceâhe had the largely unappreciated help of his opponent, John McCain, who simply ruled out covert racial appeals used by politicians of both parties in the past.
“Sen. Obama claims that he want to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes for the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don’t pay taxes. That’s not a tax cut; that’s welfare,” McCain said a couple of weeks ago.
Welfare. Uh-huh. If thatâs not a dog-whistle, Iâm the welfare queen of⌠Never mind.
And with that, farewell to Sunday Watch. This commentator will be thrilled to have his Sundays back. Thanks to all the Washington insiders, insighters, blowhards and myopicsâincluding the underachievers who in some corner of their minds know better than their performancesâfor making this column possible as well as necessary. Thanks to indulgent editors Mike Hoyt and Justin Peters. And now, back to America.
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