Obama’s ability to keep his cool under fire ”“ and not attack back ”“ “should certainly have an initial positive for Obama,” says Ben Voth, a forensics expert at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The question is whether any lingering doubts would creep in later.”
Mr. Voth also says McCain’s “base of supporters were probably satisfied that he did venture into the aggressive waters they wanted him to.”
McCain’s biggest problems are that there are fewer than three weeks until Election Day, and the nation is in a financial crisis. A bad economy is poison to the party that controls the White House, and McCain came right out of the starting gate Wednesday night aiming to show sympathy with the people ”“ and promising action.
“Americans are hurting right now, and they’re angry,” he said, calling his fellow citizens “innocent victims of greed and excess on Wall Street as well as Washington, D.C.”
I am convinced that they could have rerun one of the first two debates and no one would have noticed.
BTW the Phillies won the pennant last night. Good game
#1, pretty much.
Except, that McCain had Obama on the defense several times, and Obama resorted to outright lies (re: Acorn and Ayres, and tax hikes) in ‘rebuttal’.
Most viewer call-in results stated that McCain won the debate, yet the MSM and Fox still report that Obama either won handily or proclaimed a tie, with the win going defacto to Obama.
Clearly a disconnect between “Joe America” and the Media outlets.
Jim [#3]: Do you really regard “viewer call-in results” as more representative and reliable than standard polling? Post-debate polls indicate that Obama came out ahead. Is that just part of an MSM Conspiracy?
BTW, after the first debate, you asserted that all three presidential debate moderators (including Lehrer and Schieffer) were hostile to McCain.
http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/16808/#287151
Did Schieffer’s conduct as moderator corroborate your assertion of bias?
yes. What maes you think that the polls the MSM runs are unbiased? That they don’t have their lists of people they feel are qualified to answer the poll are polled?
As to moderators? In fact, all four moderators were part of the MSM, and have a reputation as being liberal (don’t forget, Gwen Ifle has a pro-Obama book coming out, and declined to notify the debate committee of this fact!). After his debate, Tom Brokow made a comment that ‘we have to decide how big a home people can have’ in regards to the housing crisis. REALLY???
It seems that in order to be a moderator at a debate, you have to pass a litmus test of liberal views. Why couldn’t one debate be hosted by NPR, a second by FOX, a third by a network anchor, and a fourth by a print journalist?
Or even better, pick on who is unabashedly liberal and one who was unabashedly conservative (Hannity and Colmes?) and have them run the debate like a Face the Nation or Meet the Press or No Spin Zone format. Or, as someone suggested earlier, even a TRUE Oxford-rules debate society type debate, each debate with it’s own topic.
Again, no unusual questions were allowed.
The debates were rigged. I have no doubt about it.
Jim E.
By the way, I’m down in the polls as ‘undecided’, because I refuse to answer political or personal questions on the phone. So they put me down as ‘undecided’. Isn’t that rich?
“What makes you think that the polls the MSM runs are unbiased? That they don’t have their lists of people they feel are qualified to answer the poll are polled?” —LibraryJim [#5]
Jim: Standard polling techniques involve a randomly chosen sample of voters. You asserts that the Evil MSM rigs the samples. If so, how do preelection polls (imperfect as they are) predict election outcomes as well as they do? Or does the Evil MSM also rig the elections themselves?
“The debates were rigged. I have no doubt about it” —#7
Yet the two campaigns together devised both the format and the rules for each debate. Why would McCain have agreed to slanted rules and an all-hostile set of moderators? Who had the power to make him agree? And if someone had tried to pressure him into such an agreement, wouldn’t he have come out ahead by denouncing the pressure and insisting on an unbiased set of rules and moderators?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Which of Bob Schieffer’s actions and statements during the debate best exemplify his bias against McCain?
It’s in the choice of questions, not the format that is the problem.
P.S.
Do you remember McCain inviting Obama to a series of TRUE town hall meeting debates? The great obsfucator refused. And he didn’t answer THAT issue in the debate when McCain brought it up, either. McCain is willing to meet on the Mainstream Media’s format, why couldn’t Obama meet on McCain’s format? It’s like the Democratic candidates refusing to debate on Fox. What are they afraid of? More to the point, what are they hiding that they don’t want brought up?
Three debates. With the variety of questions seen, we could have just taped the first one and replayed it twice more.
OH Man!
I tell you, no matter who you are rooting for in the election, If they put up the McCain and Obama speeches from the Alfred E. Smith memorial Dinner on YouTube — watch it!
You will be hard pressed to STOP laughing. They were both great and funny!
McCain: I know that even though there are a lot of Democrats here, some of them are rooting for me. It’s great to see you here, Hillary!
Obama: Contrary to public opinion, I was not born in a manager. I was actually born on Krypton, and sent here by my father Jor-el.
Do yourself a favor and look it up tomorrow to see if they have been posted.
Jim: I still don’t understand why McCain would have agreed to an all-hostile set of moderators? Nor why if Jim Lehrer is so biased, presidential candidates of both major parties have been so eager to have him moderate their debates?
I don’t understand it either, but I think it boils down to:
He wants to get elected, and this is the process one has to go through to get to that goal.
Did you see the A.E. Smith presentation? Great, eh?
I think there are plenty of conspiracy theorists. Those who think that 9/11 was caused by the government; and that the MSM is for Obama.
Even when a republican pollster finds that Obama is more popular among “undecideds” some will find that this is a conspiracy.
As one person noted “a paranoid person is someone who knows all the facts.”
One of the way polls are rigged is by “weighting”, more Democrates are polled than Republicans in most polls because more people register as democrates. You can poll more Dems and distort the poll. You can use only registered Dems against likely to vote Republicans. The the mix of registered to likely voters can also effect the accuracy. CBS poll had Obama with a double digit lead a few days ago. Most polls have Obama with a 4 to 5% lead. Yes there is bias in the media. Look at this Michelle Mallkin column.
About Contact Archives RSS Columns Photos Michelle Malkin “Baffled:†Secret Service can’t find anyone to corroborate reporter’s “Kill them†claim
By Michelle Malkin • October 16, 2008 02:16 AM The “Kill Them†claim spread like wildfire across the MSM as evidence of “insane rage†on the Right. Barack Obama mentioned it during the debate.
Now that the Secret Service has investigated and failed to find a single person to corroborate the reporter’s claim, I’m sure you’ll be seeing this on the front pages and nightly news lead stories in all the media outlets that spread it.
“One of the way polls are rigged is by ‘weighting,’ more Democrats are polled than Republicans in most polls because more people register as Democrats” —Dave B [#15]
Professional pollsters retained by the news media (rather than by individual candidates) have a reputational interest in getting accurate results.
Whatever their personal sympathies, they know that their polling results with be compared with other pollsters’ and ultimately with the election results. Then come the red face and the tarnished reputation.
“Dewey Defeats Truman!” is every pollster’s nightmare.
“Two weeks, five days to go, home stretch. Barack Obama and John McCain began today laying out their closing strategies. And while Obama continues to hold a double-digit lead in most national polls, it is the results in individual states that are all important.” Charles Gibson CBS reports Today!
The emphasis on Obama’s supposedly huge, possibly insurmountable lead is used by some in the mainstream media to suggest the inevitability of a Democratic win. But you have to wonder, at least in this instance, what polls ABC News is examining. Obama enjoys a lead in most opinion surveys, but it’s not as large as Gibson claimed.
Thursday’s Gallup Daily poll showed a 49% to 43% Obama lead over McCain.
Rasmussen had it at 50% to 46%.
At Zogby, it was 49% to 43%.
The IBD /TIPP tracking poll showed the race at 45% to 42%
The RealClearPolitics poll average, which incorporates findings of 13 national polls, showed a 49.5 to 42.7 Obama lead.
Why is CBS so wrong?
Dave B [#19]: This has been a close election all along. Obama has recently had a stable lead in the Electoral College. But much can change between now and the election.
Political Wire, using state-by-state averages of polls conducted within the past week, shows the electoral map as follows:
— Strong Obama lead in states with 250 electoral votes
— Weak Obama lead, 36
— Bare Obama lead (within 4%-point margin of error), 66
— Exactly tied, 15
— Bare McCain lead, 16
— Weak McCain lead, 24
— Strong McCain lead, 131
http://www.electoral-vote.com/icon.html? (updated daily)
BTW, Political wire has all-year polling data for each state:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/Graphs/virginia.html
The news media love a horse race. That’s why they tend to hype the latest big fluctuation in one direction or another. If you made your living in the same way—by competing for the attention of viewers, listeners, and readers—you’d have incentives to do the same.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s one of the ways that the profit motive, and the more general desire to engage the audience and gain market share—interacts with news coverage. For nonpolitical examples, see the evening news.
Of course, a political horse race works even better for the news media when the trailing candidate surges toward the end. Stay tuned.
I’m not saying it is a conspiracy. I just think that most of the MSM is in the tank for Obama and act accordingly. When Obama was overseas on his “tour” one reporter showed up at a McCain Rally. We know that Palin got free facials but I have heard little about Buyck-Roberson, Roberson Vs Citicorp where Obama was in a lawsuit (minor player) that helped bring about subprime loans. The media has crawled up Joe the plumbers life, we now know of leans etc but Obama’s campaign finnance manger has more leans against him and more finnance problems. WE know all about trooper gate and Palin but little about over two million dollars paid to Biden’s family by Biden’s campaign. Report’s that McCain had an affair were in the New York times. There are some ugly rumors out there about Obama that have more credibility but are not reported. How long did it take for the press to look at ACORN? Reporting by Charles Gibson that Obama has a double digit lead does not make the election a horse race. Gibson is acting as if Obama has won.
Anybody who honestly believes that the polls are accurate and that the MSM is unbiased, you probably can get a job with ACORN. You are qualified to use their fair and ethical techniques.
I liked the editorial in today’s paper:
setting: man in chair watching tv.
sound on tv:
“I’m Barak Obama, and I approved this edition of the NBC Nightly News.”
🙂
I think if people work a little they can understand polls. As far as MSM being a “liberal” propaganda machine, I don’t think such a view tells us very much about the media.
The media is corporate and runs by advertising. There is a general culture in the media that is socially liberal but economically conservative. I’m sure plenty in the media think that creationists are rubes. It’s also pretty clear that the media is lazy, and lots of journalists like to be close to power.
Journalists often don’t like to be called “liberal” so they often spend more time finding a conservative counterweight if they quote a liberal source.
As far as polls go, fivethirtyeight.com is the way to go. Nate silver is an amazing analyst. He’s honest about where he stands, but lists his criteria and arguments precisely. his analysis of CBS poll is that it tilts Democratic by about 3 points. The plain fact, however, is that Obama is in the lead, polling wise by a substantial amount.
Here is a good story from the ground game in Pennsylvania.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html
“The news media love a horse race. That’s why they tend to hype the latest big fluctuation in one direction or another. If you made your living in the same way—by competing for the attention of viewers, listeners, and readers—you’d have incentives to do the same. … Of course, a political horse race works even better for the news media when the trailing candidate surges toward the end. Stay tuned” —#20
CNN reports that Obama’s lead has shrunk to 5 percentage points:
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/10/20/cnn_poll_obamas_lead_shrinks_to_five_points.html
Zogby’s tracking poll reported a 3-point lead.