Saturday, September 13, 2008
I have not watched Gibson's interview of Palin, and after reading about it, I don't think I will – it seems apparent the man had an agenda, and isn't particularly influenced by facts or truths. Not exactly what I look for in a reporter.
Nancy Kallitechnis is a liberal writer whom I had never heard of until this morning, when reader Bill G. passed along a link to one of her posts on HillaryClintonForum.net. With some Googling all I could really discover is that she's a prolific poster on many liberal-oriented sites. It's clear from her posts that she's a very enthusiastic Hillary supporter, and has no love at all for The One. She posted a comparison of Gibson's interviews with Palin and Obama, and despite her agenda for Hillary, she makes some good points. Here's her conclusion:
There’s no doubt the Charles Gibson interviews showed extreme prejudice against Palin and extreme favoritism towards Obama. His manner towards Palin was much more negative. He asked her much more difficult questions and the questions were more adversarial. He constantly questioned her ability to lead but never questioned Obama’s ability to lead, all the more amazing considering that Palin was the only one with executive experience and the presidency is the highest level executive job in politics. The camera angles always focused on Obama’s face when he was talking making him the center of attention yet during Palin’s interview the angle often focused on her back apparently for the purpose of lessening the impact of her presence.
The questions, camera angle, and manner of the interviewer were designed in a way that favored Obama. Because Palin is a historic woman candidate and has been attacked with sexism it is reasonable to believe that ABC News is trying to harm her candidacy due to sexism. Of particular note is that Gibson asked Obama four questions about breaking the AA political glass ceiling but asked Palin zero questions about her breaking the women’s political glass ceiling. ABC’s prejudice against Palin was wrong and is blocking women’s progress towards equality. Palin is brave and strong and she, along with her supporters, will battle sexism and other forms of harmful prejudice in order to improve our world. This is a wake up call for ABC and the sexist news media to help them achieve their potential to be fair to candidates because fairness in the media is essential to a democracy.
Interesting stuff, especially considering the political inclinations of the author. What's even more interesting are the comments following the post...
Biden's tax returns were posted to Obama's web site today, and on them you can discover that he and his wife donated 0.3% of their income to charity last year. The Obamas, by comparison, donated 5.7% of their considerably higher income to charity last year.
Now I don't think either of those numbers is “bad” in any sense of that word. By comparison, Debbie and I (in percentage terms) were somewhere between the two of them. I believe that giving to charity (and which charity one chooses to give to) are entirely personal matters, and the quantity of a candidate's charitable gifts has no weight at all in my decision about supporting them.
But this reminds me of a book I read some time ago, called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. The “surprising truth” in the book is this: measured in dollars or percentage, charitable giving by liberals is dwarfed by charitable giving by conservatives (and libertarians). This is consistent with my own (far less rigorous) observations and experiences in charity work.
McCain contributed 26% of his income last year to charities. Palin's tax returns have not yet been made public, so we don't know what their contributions were.
When I read that book, I came away with the thought that this aggregate difference in charitable giving carries a profound message of some sort. The closest I ever came to being able to articulate it was the notion that liberals in general expect government to do things for them; conservatives and libertarians are much more interested in having the government get out of the way so they can do things themselves. There's yet a deeper message there, I think...
I've got plenty of beefs with McCain – I'm not thrilled by the man at all. His candidacy has turned me into a single-issue voter. So I don't have any kind of knee-jerk negative reaction to criticisms of McCain from the Obama camp, as I think there are plenty of things for them to criticize.
By now you've probably heard about (and maybe you've seen it) Obama's ad criticizing McCain for being old-fashioned and out-of-touch. The ad specifically mentions his inability to send an email, as part of its general characterization of him. And if you're paying attention at all, you've probably already heard that Team Obama is looking pretty darned stupid on that account, as they apparently missed the reason why McCain can't send an email: his North Vietnamese torturers made sure that he'd never be able to do anything requiring dexterity in his hands again. The best sober discussion of this incident that I've seen is here.
Team Obama seems to be remarkably prone to this sort of stupidity. They've made gaffe after gaffe, and despite the best efforts of the in-the-tank-for-Obama lamestream media to suppress them, the word is getting out. I'm beginning to get the impression of a rock-star celebrity-based campaign run by amateurs who were getting away with it only because of The One's image and celebrity. But those are looking a little tarnished these days, and the light seems brighter over in the McCain/Palin camp – and only because of Palin.
I'd pay good money to be a fly on the wall of a Democratic strategy session right about now...
I hope the Republicans don't get too cocksure during this period. Must be mighty heady for them...
