Live Thoughts on Biden v. Palin

There is a lot being written about this election as a watershed moment for the rise of new media political coverage. One reason is just timing: the election comes just as new media is really hitting its stride. Another reason is the many young people joining the political ranks after consuming gallons of Obama Kool-Aid. A third reason, however, is the level of micro-competition taking place here. By micro-competition, I’m thinking of the LONG campaign season due to the heavily fragmented primaries (some 15 candidates in all). That process created a culture where, even more than usual, little details mattered as voters tried to differentiate between candidates whose policy positions were often alike. That culture has fed into the general election, even though there are real policy topics to discuss now. With all that detail, in this nitty-gritty (or nit-picky, depending how you see it) campaign culture, new media has come to play a crucial role. Blogs are ideally suited to link together small items to help us see the whole. More importantly, they’re ideally suited to comment on small items in rapid succession: which is why if there’s one blogging practice that really exploded in this election, it’s the practice of live-blogging political events. With that, here are my live thoughts on tonight’s debate.

9:00 pm: Both candidates come out strong. Biden is forceful and makes himself the wonk–calls out Sarah Palin early for being fluffy by asking if HE can “get back to the question.” She’s articulate and poised, more confident than she has seemed in interviews with the press, and carefully steering the first question about the economy to her (professed) area of expertise, corruption.

9:20 pm: Ouch, Palin is using her stump speech again. “Government is too often the problem.” She is making a point of showcasing everything she learned in debate boot camp this week. “McCain’s plan is detailed, and I want to give you some details.” And she does actually know the numbers, impressive. If she could have said ‘detail’ again she would have. Not sure how credible it is to say the government is bad when you are running to join it, but hey, that’s just me. Biden is acing the delicate balance of being aggressive against Palin’s policy statements without attacking her and taking the feminist backlash by speaking to Gwen Ifill and not Palin directly. Biden’s best comment so far: McCain’s health care plan is “the ultimate bridge to nowhere.” Read the rest of this entry »

Old Dude 1, Techheads 0

Last week, I was all amused to watch CNN steal Barack’s thunder by breaking his veep choice before his so-so-cool text message went out. I took it as a sign that old media might be more agile and relevant in this high tech age than some bloggers like to argue.

This week, I’m all amused to learn that McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his veep. Of the choices he had, I think he made the best one. His other finalists–social conservative Romney, ‘Sam’s Club’ conservative Pawlenty and hawk Lieberman–were all fatally flawed: reviled as a person, an unknown and gasp! a Democrat.

But the benefits of picking Palin–proven maverick, social conservative–are undercut by the baseness of assuming that Hillary voters will swing to her just because she’s a woman:

1. most Hillary voters weren’t for her JUST because of her gender
2. the ones that were, the ones for whom “women’s issues” are the only issues that matter are not the kind of people who would vote for a pro-lifer.

Plus, as a man with serious health/age concerns, McCain is picking a VP with a decent shot of being No. 1 one day. Palin’s foreign policy resume just isn’t big enough for that. That said, on domestic policy, I think Palin fits right where McCain wants to position himself, so overall, I think it’s the right choice.

Given that neither McCain or Obama totally bungled their choices, then, I think the veep choices come out even, meaning the race is still neck and neck and still focused on the same few states as before.

What McCain does win, however, is the media battle. Mr. Old Dude, supposedly out of touch and mocked by Paris Hilton for his mashup video of Obama managed to keep his choice a total secret in the age of 24-hour news and bloggers dying to scoop him. Meanwhile, Mr. 21st century, Obama, got scooped. Score one for being old, I guess.

Apocalypse 7: Stealing Barack’s Thunder

Unless you lived under a rock last week, you probably heard some chatter about the Obama campaign’s plan to announce a runningmate (it’s Biden, by the way) via text message The young faithful Obama-ites would be in the know before the media pundits; the news would be all over the blogs before it hit the evening broadcast.

It didn’t work out that way. Late on Friday night, CNN had enough material to break the Biden news on air, followed within minutes by the other networks and the websites of all the major newspapers. Panicked, the campaign sent out their text to supporters at about 3 am (AFTER the news was out for the general public) instead of the 8 am time they had planned. Oops.

Now my anecdotal reporting suggests a certain correlation between the Obamamaniacs and the free culture radicals who are waiting for blogs and citizen journalists–camera phones in hand–to obliterate the CNN’s of the world. Both groups are young, urban lefties, after all.

So fittingly, when the Obama cell phone campaign got scooped, the free culture argument lost out too: the threat of new technologies didn’t kill the old media hounds, it just made them work harder to get the story first.

By raising the bar, might the Internet actually be good for the news industry?