MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

More on that blogger call: “McCain widens dialogue on blogs”

• Posted by Beth on May 16th, 2008 filed in 2008 election, Blogs, General, John McCain, Moonbats, Politics   Democrats    

Via Tech Republican, The Washington Times has an article today about the McCain campaign inviting more kinds of bloggers, and it’s rather enlightening, seeing the lefty reaction that I saw yesterday is exactly what I thought it’d be.

The strategy was in full swing yesterday when Mr. McCain invited non-conservative bloggers to join his regular blogger conference call, just hours after he delivered a major speech previewing his war strategy and other priorities for a first presidential term.

It already has started a war among liberal bloggers over how to react to Mr. McCain’s overture.

In answering the first question on the call, Mr. McCain said his likely Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, lacks the judgment to be commander in chief, which set him up for a bruising from the readers at TalkingPointsMemo.com, a liberal-leaning site that joined in the call. [Link here; be sure to read it and the comments - Beth]

Blogger Greg Sargent said it amounted to “what may be [Mr. McCain's] most direct attack yet on Barack Obama’s national security credentials.” But commenters were split: Some took aim at Mr. McCain, some said they were thankful for the intelligence on “what the enemy is planning,” and others lashed out at Mr. Sargent, saying he should have been harsher in evaluating Mr. McCain’s attack.

“This IS a Democratic blog, and as such, it would seem to me that there SHOULD be SOME bias with regards to how YOU report of McCain’s craziness, as opposed to treating his ranting and attacks with a sort of dignity they and he DO NOT deserve,” wrote one emphasis-abundant reader.

Mr. McCain’s campaign said the Web outreach is a logical extension of an attempt to reach voters beyond his base. It also builds on his successful use of conference calls with conservative bloggers during the Republican primary, which blunted many of the harshest criticisms of the senator.

“The plan is to take the work we’ve already built on with conservative bloggers and to open up a dialogue with non-conservative bloggers and even nonpolitical bloggers,” said Patrick Hynes, Mr. McCain’s point man for blog outreach.

“We hope to be the most accessible and transparent campaign in history, to take advantage of what we think is one of the campaign’s strongest assets, which is Senator McCain himself, and frankly to empower voters who are also bloggers to get the answers they need to decide who to vote for.”

And this:

“I don’t think the people at DailyKos are going to treat John McCain mercifully, but I think the fact that people get their question heard makes them dial it back a bit,” said Soren Dayton, a blogger who worked briefly for the McCain campaign and now works at a public affairs company, New Media Strategies.

Oh, how I wish I shared my friend Soren’s optimism on this one. I seriously doubt they’re going to do so. It would certainly be nice, but when have lefty bloggers ever been fair, intellectually honest, or reasonable? These are the people pushing the “100 year war” and “McSame” memes, after all.

I don’t fault the McCain campaign for doing this - I think it says a lot about him and the kind of Presidency he’d have (i.e., far better communication of his agenda than we’ve seen from the Bush administration, at the very least). And really, he’s welcomed detractors (as in, from the right) all along and has taken tough questions from conservatives all along, especially in the earlier blogger calls. I just think the Left is being given more credit than they deserve, based on their rhetoric and behaviour over the last eight years. I’m thinking they’re waiting for a “macaca” incident. They’ll have a long wait, although they’re masters at distortion, and I won’t be surprised when they use these blogger calls regularly against McCain. Just watch.

To Erin Kotecki’s credit (she’s the one who asked the stupid “timetable” question), at least she didn’t respond to the opportunity with the ingratitude and nastiness that some did.

She said she doesn’t expect bloggers to be as nice as some of the traditional media have been in asking him questions, and was thankful for the chance.

“The fact that I could ask my question and have it smacked down is farther than a lot of people could get,” she said.

Not that I expect she’ll change her vote, but at least she didn’t repay the opportunity with bile. What bothers me, though, is that it appears some are merely using this to push the DNC agenda. In fact, right after the blogger call, I emailed rightwingprof saying “who invited the DNC?”–not realizing that the McCain campaign had invited lefty bloggers. It just seemed so obvious that they were pushing DNC talking points–even the “2013 speech = withdrawal timetable” meme had already been pushed out to libs and the media. That said, John McCain answered it forcefully and without any way to honestly distort the meaning of what he’s said. Not that it’s stopped some people from trying, though.

Again: “We hope to be the most accessible and transparent campaign in history, to take advantage of what we think is one of the campaign’s strongest assets, which is Senator McCain himself, and frankly to empower voters who are also bloggers to get the answers they need to decide who to vote for.”

More of this, please - but expect more of the Democrats using his accessibility and transparency - you know, the same things they’ve said Bush doesn’t have - against him in the future. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.