Barracuda Bandwagon

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 24, 2008 9:56 AM

The media spotlight has swung back to Sarah Palin, and it's not just the designer outfits that cost more than some families might spend to send a kid to college.

It's not just that Obama is off to Hawaii. It's not just that McCain hasn't changed his stump speech for days. It's not just that we're all tired of Joe the plumber. It's not just that things are so slow Drudge is touting this link-- "VIDEO: Obama Sneezes on Reporter." (What's next, Obama scrapes gum from shoe?)

It's that the punditocracy has concluded the Republican ticket is going down and is already fighting the next war.

Doggone media -- they inflict this election on us for two excruciating years, and now, before it's even over, they've moved on to 2012.

Yes, the very same people who once told you Hillary couldn't lose are now handicapping Palin's chances in the Republican primaries four years from now. That is, when they're not churning out pieces about how Obama will govern.

Got whiplash yet?

I'm not buying that Barack has this wrapped up, even with the spate of favorable battleground-state polls. (Roughly tied in North Carolina? How can that be?) But I am interested in how the prognosticators can in one breath be portraying Palin as Ms. Liability and in the next talking her up as a presidential candidate in her own right. That's quite a comeback, especially when she hasn't yet lost this election. But I think it also has something to do with the ongoing civil war in conservative circles, as we've chronicled here, which is forcing some pundits to embrace or reject Palinism -- something that didn't exist (at least outside of Juneau) before Aug. 29.

So forget about the prospect of Vice President Palin. Or at least, scratch the vice.

Atlantic's Marc Ambinder kicks off the action:

"There's a suspicion in some McCain loyalist precincts that Gov. Sarah Palin is beginning to play the Republican base against John McCain -- McCain won't let her campaign in Michigan . . . McCain won't let her bring up Jeremiah Wright . . . McCain doesn't like her terrorist pal talks . . . Think ahead to 2010 . . . 2011 . . . 2012. Palin is ambitious. Very ambitious.

"And if she wants the job, she's easily the frontrunner to become THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness. She is a favorite of talk radio and Fox News conservatives, and speaks their language as only a true member of the club can. (Her recent Limbaugh interview was full of dog whistles that any Dittohead would recognize. Including her actual use of the word ditto.) . . .

"Palin will be judged to be 'ready' in four years. George Will and David Brooks and Peggy Noonan will all swoon over her once more. Ok, maybe not George Will. . . . Republicans tend to pick the next guy in line. Strangely enough, the next guy in line is now Sarah Palin, by virtue of her being the VP nominee this year. She will have the benefit of being both an outsider candidate and the natural heir to the nomination; indeed, the only candidate who will have experience in a general election campaign."

You betcha.

Former GOP operative Patrick Ruffini sees a Lazarus scenario in a post titled "Is Sarah Palin the Right's Howard Dean?" (who bounced back from 2004 to become DNC chairman):

"Everyone remembers Howard Dean for the 'scream' but I think his example provides a context in which Sarah Palin could lose the election, but ultimately win the party and pave the way for a conservative victory in the future more meaningful than McCain-Palin '08 would be.

"I'm rooting for Sarah Palin, and in temperament she is nothing like Dean . . .

"Who seems to be the flashpoint in this elite-grassroots war currently raging in the GOP? Like Dean, it's Sarah Palin.

"Yet, there is a big risk coming up in 15 days. If McCain-Palin loses, and the conventional wisdom hardens that Palin was a big part of the reason for it, the GOP could will learn the wrong lessons from 2008. It will be said that McCain should have picked an uninspiring establishment VP. If we listen to Brooks, Noonan, and Frum, the next time out, the establishment will be emboldened in its natural distrust of happy warrior populists like Palin who bring their own political base to the table . . .

"If instead the lesson of Palin is that we need to pick safe, uninspiring candidates (who will get utterly clobbered by Obama's $1 billion+ re-election campaign, btw) who don't offend Christopher Buckley, then I fear we are in for a long winter indeed."

We're certainly in for a long winter of feuding pundits unless McCain-Palin pulls it out.

David Corn, still focused for some reason on 2008, is less generous:

"My rough survey of the Rs and conservatives I have encountered on the street, at political events, and in green rooms at TV studios is that about one half to two-thirds will admit they believe is that Palin is either a misguided error on McCain's part that can be overcome or an act of blatant misjudgment that has led to a freakin' disaster . . .

"The RNC has done a lot more than put lipstick on a pig. It's been dressing up an albatross.

"Should McCain lose on November 4, I wonder if he will ever acknowledge that Palin was a major part of his downfall."

In the Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott blames the party bigwigs for the fashion disaster:

"Every time I think the campaign professionals at the Republican National Committee can't possibly do anything else to sink the party, they do something else that simply defies logical explanation. Like taking a candidate who epitomizes Middle American values and spending $150,000 to dress her up in Saks Fifth Avenue finery.

"Apparently, they just couldn't stand the thought of a GOP candidate for vice president actually wearing the same clothes on the campaign trail that she wears in real life. No, they had to go make her look like . . . one of them.

"Did nobody over there think it through and realize doing this would hand Obama and the Democrats the last perfect piece of evidence of how out of touch Republicans are with the real world?"

CNN's Campbell Brown, who as I noted the other day has drawn the wrath of the McCain campaign, says it's fine for the RNC to pay for Palin's wardrobe and stylists:

"Women get scrutinized based on appearance far more than men. And look, I speak from experience here. When I wear a bad outfit on the air, I get viewer email complaining about it. A lot of email. Seriously. When Wolf Blitzer wears a not-so-great tie, how much email do you think he gets?

"My point is for women unfortunately appearance is part of the job. If Wolf or Anderson shows up on the air without make-up, you think you would even notice? I show up without make-up? Trust me, you'll notice."

This just in. "SNL" costume designer says Palin wanted to wear nicer outfits: "I had to get her to understand why she needed to wear the same thing as Tina [Fey]. We had gone off and created it for the first time a month ago, a look we identified as Sarah Palin. She had moved on in her own image of herself."

In her first newspaper interview, Palin tells the Chicago Tribune's Jill Zuckman that the clothing story has been distorted:

" 'That whole thing is just, bad!' she said. 'Oh, if people only knew how frugal we are. It's kind of painful to be criticized for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported,' said Palin, saying the clothes are not worth $150,000 and were bought for the Republican National Convention. Still, she has been wearing pricey clothes at campaign events this fall. She said they will be given back, auctioned off or sent to charity. Most of them, she said, haven't even left the belly of her campaign plane."

Most polls (except for the AP) still favor Obama:

"Senator Barack Obama is showing surprising strength among portions of the political coalition that returned George W. Bush to the White House four years ago, a cross section of support that, if it continues through Election Day, would exceed that of Bill Clinton in 1992, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News polls.

"Underscoring the building strength of Mr. Obama's candidacy in the final phase of the campaign, he was ahead of Mr. McCain among various groups that voted for Mr. Bush four years ago: those with incomes greater than $50,000 a year; married women; suburbanites; white Catholics, and is even competitive among white men -- a group that has not voted for a Democrat over a Republican since 1972, when pollsters began surveying people after they voted."

The NYT margin: 52-39 Obama. Oh, and Bush is at 22.

To no one's surprise, the Times endorses Obama.

Salon looks at the year's media misfires, which is another way of saying how the McCain campaign blew it. In fact, Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro lead off with " The Cult of Sarah Palin":

"McCain's choice of a running mate on the eve of the Republican National Convention set off a wave of emotions that quickly veered from 'Sarah Who?' to 'Sarah Wow!' Even amid the initial gooey-eyed gush, there were dangerous signs that the McCain team had done a sloppy job in researching her background. But the boffo convention speech, the giddy poll numbers and Palin's rock-star crowds gave rise to half-baked theories about the veep pick's ability to transform the presidential race and even snare a chunk of the feminist vote. After the disastrous Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, however, the Palin pick seemed less a moose-hunter's delight and more like stale (Dan) Quayle. A Pew Research Center national poll released this week found that 49 percent of voters now hold negative opinions about Palin, compared to 32 percent voting thumbs down in mid-September. The Pew survey discovered that a stunning 60 percent of all women under the age of 50 currently have negative feelings about Palin.

" Steve Schmidt Is a Genius. When McCain took the lead after the GOP convention in many national polls, the immediate reaction was to lionize top strategist Steve Schmidt for imposing order and discipline on the unruly campaign. But, in truth, Schmidt's ascension probably only intensified a problem that has dogged McCain from the outset -- a focus on day-to-day tactics over long-term strategy and a coherent rationale for the campaign. McCain often dominated the daily news cycle, but failed to dominate the hearts and minds of voters. Many in the Obama campaign believe that the turning point in the race came when McCain dramatically suspended his campaign on the eve of the first debate in order to fly to Washington to join in the ineffectual dithering over the economic crisis. Schmidt's war-room mentality (he ran the rapid-response team for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004) may have been ill-suited for a political year when McCain needed a Big Idea to compete with Obama . . .

" The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back. During July and August, just about the easiest way to get on television was to announce that you were an angry Hillary voter who would never, ever support Obama. Of course, political science studies dating back three decades show that party loyalty invariably trumps hurt feelings by the time November rolls around. Guess what? For all the PUMA nonsense that filled the airwaves over the summer, the Pew Research Center poll this week shows that Obama is beating McCain by a 91-to-5-percent margin among self-identified Democrats. So while independent-minded blue-collar voters who may have opted for Clinton in the primary are still being wooed by the Obama campaign in states like Pennsylvania, virtually all the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have (surprise!) returned to the fold."

I kept saying at the time that of course most Hillary voters wouldn't defect to McCain. But the media loved that story line.

Former McCain 2000 adviser Mike Murphy offers the RNC some "possible spin lines" for Neiman Marcusgate:

"What you sneering critics in the liberal MSM fail to see here is . . . a Jobs Program! Saks floorwalkers, cashiers, a team of sweating porters to haul the merchandise from the store to the motorcade . . . chiropractors to treat those porters. Sarah Palin knows how to create jobs!

"Still cheaper than Mitt Romney's hair products. We're saving money here . . .

"William Ayers is a terrorist!

"New ad slogan: 'Clothes for Gov. Palin? $150,000. Time machine to go back two months to late August and ask what the Hell were Schmidt and Davis thinking when they cooked up this idea and sold it to McCain? Priceless.' "

Of course, as Adam Nagourney notes here, Murphy gave me rare behind-the-scenes access during the 2000 campaign and is not averse to self-promotion. But he's a media analyst now and is supposed to be candid.

Could things have been different if Murphy had worked for Mac instead of NBC and Time? The New Republic's Jason Zengerle ponders:

"What's been most riveting about Murphy's criticism of McCain has been the thread of regret that's run through it. Prior to the denouement this past summer, Murphy was presumably offering these criticisms to McCain in private; the two men were known to talk frequently (much to the consternation of some members of the McCain campaign). But, according to one Murphy friend, Murphy hasn't spoken with McCain since July -- 'either because McCain stopped calling him, or because Schmidt confiscated McCain's cell phone.' So, instead, Murphy seems to be trying to communicate with McCain through his TV appearances and blog posts -- which, as Murphy himself seems to recognize, is a doomed effort. 'My advice, as usual,' he wrote in a long blog post offering McCain some tips before the final debate, 'is probably the opposite of what his people are advising him.' . . .

"Reading and watching Murphy, you get the sense that he'd happily trade the professional accolades for the personal satisfaction of having worked for McCain this one last time."

Look at this latest Obama broadside against the problems that piled up during the Bush years:

"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously."

Oh wait -- that's McCain, talking to the Washington Times. Isn't that what Palin accused Biden of, looking backward?

There is one group that doesn't think Obama is a lock:

"Two weeks out, only the Democrats in Washington think Obama might not win," says Tucker Carlson. "That's not the result of a scientific study, but instead the conclusion I've reached after many lunches, dinners and elevator rides with DC Democrats. Against all evidence, a good number of them have convinced themselves that John McCain is going to be the next president.

"Partly this is superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder when you spill the shaker: predictions are bad luck. But it's also the voice of experience . . .

"Give them a few drinks and many Democrats make remarkably self-loathing noises: we're disorganized, our interest groups are out of control, the rest of the country hates us. To these Democrats, Obama isn't really winning; the Republicans are losing. They fear fate could intervene at the last minute to change the course of the election . . .

"No one's more confident in Republican efficiency than Democrats. It's almost touching, and totally unwarranted. In real life, there are no WMD: Republicans have no master plan for victory, no October Surprise. The operation is as disjointed as it looks."

You mean the October surprise is no surprise? Who knew?