Defeatism is the Greatest Enemy of the McCain campaign
About the Author: I also write under the names Rudi Stettner and Magdeburger Joe. My home websites are rudistettner.com and magdeburgerjoe.com. Through my writing I like to promote a "labour conservative " social outlook as well as my eclectic tastes and interests Read more from this authorEveryone knows that Obama can’t win on his merits. Bluntly put, he has none. He isn’t running on the issues, since he’s demonstrated that he’ll switch positions at the drop of a hat. What he’s running on is a cult of personality, his own charisma and celebrity. Imagine JFK with no platform but a youthful smile and some vaguely optimistic rhetoric and that is the Obama platform in a nutshell.
Beyond the cult of personality, his real power comes from being treated as the inevitable winner. As far as the press is concerned, Obama is the incumbent, the election is nothing more than a formality and these next few months are a celebration of his victory.
Too many people, even those who hate Obama, see his victory as inevitable. That’s not because of the poll numbers, but the perception created by the media with its constant coverage of the Messiah from Chicago and its determination to create the perception that you can’t fight the future and that the election is already over. That same perception was used by the media to steamroll Hillary. It’s now being used to steamroll McCain. And while the media can’t control what happens at the polls, it can discourage and dispirit the opposition.
While there has always been media bias, what we are seeing in the election of 2008 goes well beyond media bias, to outright election tampering. There isn’t even any pretense at fairness, nothing beyond a media selected coronation. You can’t even call it dirty tactics, it’s an outright assault on democracy by the major corporations that control the news media. It has as much in common with conventional media bias as a coup d’etat has with poll tampering.
If the media wins, it defeats democracy and fulfills its dreams of being able to decide who becomes President or not. If the media wins, the perception of McCain as doomed to lose and Obama as the certain winner will follow voters into the voting booth. For McCain to win, the media must lose.
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