MEDIAWATCH:TO THE victors belong the spoils, and to the vanquished the leaks, writes Kevin Cullen
As the USS Obama cruised into post-election presidential mode, the good ship McCain/Palin began taking on water. Obama named his transition team and made a highly publicised visit to the White House, while the McCain crowd pointed fingers, most of them aimed squarely at the plain-speakin', gun-totin' governor of Alaska.
Nothing can conjure sympathy for an unsympathetic politician like the prospect of a bunch of highly paid political operatives using the cover of anonymity to blame her for the demise of a campaign that was rudderless even before she was named first mate. For all her vapid folksiness, it was impossible not to feel a little sorry for Sarah Palin, who fell victim to an internecine smear campaign by critics who blamed her for everything but McCain's perpetual crankiness.
Unidentified campaign officials used willing accomplices in the news media to suggest that Sarah Baracuda thought Africa was a country. She also had trouble naming the countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Some McCain aides were taken aback when they showed up to talk policy and found her sashaying around her hotel room in nothing but a towel.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, if they had leaked that last story before the election, Joe Sixpack might have put his beer down long enough to get off the couch and actually vote for Babebraham Lincoln and The Old Guy.
It was bad enough reading this stuff in the New York Times and Newsweek, but how do you explain the same embarrassing stories appearing on Fox? Et tu, Rupert?
Because none of the leakers were identified by name, it's impossible to say whether they were genuinely appalled at Palin's ignorance or merely covering their own rear ends after pushing her onto the GOP ticket in a shameless sop to the religious right.
A third possibility is that all these Republican hired guns saw the exit polls which confirmed that Palin was a real drag on the ticket and were trying to pre-empt any thoughts Annie Oakley might have on throwing her coon-skin cap in the ring come 2012.
Palin spent much of her time in the spotlight decrying enemies real and perceived in the liberal press. But with friends like hers, who needs pinko journalists?
Besides the smearing of Sarah, there was some serious journalism produced in the wake of Barack Obama's historic election. Writing in the Boston Globe, academic and retired US army colonel Andrew Bacevich, an outspoken critic of the Iraq misadventure, optimistically predicted the days of reckless, evangelical foreign policy were over. Bacevich's words carried a special poignancy, as his son and namesake was killed in Iraq last year serving as a first lieutenant with the army's 1st Cavalry Division. But, like the Newsweek story entitled, "Goodbye Anti-intellectualism: Brains are Back!", Bacevich's words might be either premature or a case of wishful thinking.
On the philistine medium of choice, talk radio, there was no indication that the embrace of anti-intellectualism or the certitudes of the religious right had softened. In fact, the superpatriots on talk radio have taken to calling themselves "the Resistance", as if there's something subversively heroic about being irresponsible at best and racist at worst.
They have already pledged to impeach Obama. It's hard if not damn near impossible - okay, it is impossible - to impeach somebody who hasn't taken office yet. But these talk radio guys are the biggest purveyors of American exceptionalism and they think they can do anything and don't care what you Paddies and Frogs and Limeys think, anyway.
Many on the hard right take it as an article of faith that Obama's first order of business will be to smite his talk radio enemies by enforcing the so-called "fairness doctrine", which requires broadcasters to air opposing points of view. Many of those who people talk radio don't have opposable thumbs, much less a tolerance for opposing viewpoints. As W once put it with regards to Iraq - if you ain't with 'em, you're agin 'em.
Most Americans, it should be noted, suspect that president Obama will be a tad too preoccupied with the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan, to spend much time worrying about the lunatics on talk radio.
Incidentally, when Michael Savage and others on talk radio assert that Obama is a communist Muslim, does the fairness doctrine require that somebody go on air and state that the president-elect is a capitalist apostate?
While the talk radio yahoos continue to take themselves far too seriously, their influence, like Sarah Palin's star power, is waning.
Rush Limbaugh, the king of American talk radio, had three main objectives this year: to block McCain from getting the nomination; to get independents to vote for Hillary Clinton, reasoning she'd be easier to beat; and finally an all-out push to get evangelicals and the rest of the Republican base to put aside their qualms about the secularist McCain to deny Obama the White House.
How'd that work out for you, Rush? Truth is, Rush doesn't care. He's laughing all the way to the bank and, besides, when your stock in trade is lying and whipping up fear, it's always more fun to be in opposition.
While Rush was counting his millions, poor oul' Sarah hightailed it back to Alaska to get ready for the upcoming wedding of her daughter Bristol and Levi Johnston, the hockey-playin' redneck father of Bristol's unborn child. The upcoming Palin-Johnston nuptials is a shotgun wedding, not necessarily because the young'uns are being forced to get hitched, but because much of the congregation in Wasilla will be packin' heat.
And, in Sarah's defence, how was she was supposed to know Africa ain't a country? It's not like she can see it from her house or anything.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe. cullen@globe.com