It's The War, Stupid

Michael Cooper's New York Times article on how John McCain is trying to "recapture" the "vigor" of his last campaign nicely encapsulates the congenital unwillingness of the political press to cover issues. I'm not nearly so naive as to think that issues and public opinion of the issues is determinative in electoral politics, but in the case of McCain's waxing and waning fortunes, that's clearly what's happening. Back in 2000, McCain's ultra-hawkish national security views were low-salience and moderately popular, and the process issues on which he has a lot of appeal to moderates were high-salience.

Today, the relative salience of these issues has flipped and McCain's national security views have become very unpopular among moderates and independents. Meanwhile, McCain was never well-liked by the conservative base. The "vigor" of his previous campaign derived from the fact that his political profile at the time was popular with many independents and moderate Republicans, not primarily the reverse.

Comments

John McCain is a corrupt traitor who has betrayed Americans in his support of the third-world invasion of the U.S. Having signed the Conservative Exodus Project, I could never vote for him.

http://www.conservativeexodusproject.com/

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Posted by Right-Winger | April 30, 2007 1:02 PM

They don't cover the issues because it would strain their ADD riddled brains. (And I apologize to all the kids out there, including my own, with ADD). The MSM have the attention spans of gnats. Most of them are completely ignorant of public policy matters and couple it with a completely superficial understanding of both US and world history. Believe it or not many of them are quite bright (in the high SAT sense of the word), but they are smug, complacent, unimaginaitive and totally overwhelmed by the conventional wisdom that dominates their milieu. This is why they suck and have failed us so miserably.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | April 30, 2007 1:04 PM

The "vigor" of his previous campaign derived from the fact that his political profile at the time was popular with many independents and moderate Republicans.

Those people are now moderate Democrats and independents, and they've shifted for the same reasons that McCain is losing them.

Posted by Clark | April 30, 2007 1:11 PM

What Klein's Nut said. They could briefly discuss a candidate's stands on a few issues even in a puff piece, but they don't. Instead, all we get is this damned horse-race coverage.

Their excuse is that the electorate supposedly isn't interested in policy details. But there's a big gap between not being interested in minutae of a candidate's policy on immigration or health care, and not being interested in the basics of where they stand. And the Heathers of the press won't even bother with that much, despite evidence that the public is genuinely interested in knowing at least that much.

Posted by RT | April 30, 2007 2:01 PM

Right. Some portion of the idiot vote has now noticed that John McCain is gung-ho on the war that's no fun anymore.

Posted by The Next to Last Pope | April 30, 2007 3:06 PM

McCain might not understand how he's seen, which is that in 2000 he was seen as exciting & contrarian, and now he's seen as an old guy wandering through Baghdad like Mr. Magoo.

Posted by American Citizen | April 30, 2007 4:50 PM

I don't quite agree, I think it's pretty clear McCain has moved aggressively to embrace Bush in the last few years and that this has been quite costly to him in terms of his media image. Iraq has been the most visble issue but still only part of the picture; it's the "maverick" and "straight talk" conceptions of McCain that have been utterly destroyed, and rightfully so.

Posted by Korha | April 30, 2007 5:34 PM

the vague, euphenistic, and obsessively sexualized msm language around the mccain candidacy is precisely the language of ads for viagra, cialis &tc....

Posted by nick | April 30, 2007 9:56 PM