Joe Klein: Schmidt Jumps the Shark

[deminks]

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/schmidt_jumps_the_shark.html

Ben Smith fact-checks the McCain campaign's ridiculous conference call assault on the press. But it should be remembered that Steve Schmidt is doing this for two (nefarious) reasons:

1. he's hoping to work the refs: if he complains enough about press bias, we mainstream sorts will cower, cringe and try to seek false equivalences between the two campaigns.

2. the more time we spend covering this nonsense, the less we'll spend on the real issues in this campaign.

Politico Link here:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13747.html

McCain camp criticism rife with errors

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

(end snips)

Liar, liar pants on fire. I heard he was screaming and carrying on. Desperate is as desperate does.

[AlCzervik]

1. yes but this is exactly the type of things "the base" likes, the evil liberal media and the bashing

of it.

imo most of this is soley base pandering.

[Cha]

2. I smell BLOWBACK!

steve schmidt whining about the lies they tell just might get some investigating whereas they wouldn't have.

[MarjorieG]

3. Get extra consideration in time for the debate?

[C_U_L8R]

4. "false equivalences" indeed

come the election day... the pundits and talking heads are gonna be choking on their silly "false equivalences"