Presidential campaign: August 2008 Archives

John McCain has announced first-term Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Why the first-termer? Were they friends? What's to follow?

These and other questions that can be abbreviated "WTF?" come immediately to mind.

In an earlier posting, I complained (some would say "whined") about the reluctance of John McCain's campaign to provide details of his local appearance until a couple of days before the event.

The campaign was sending out robo-calls and e-mails about the appearance the previous Wednesday, but campaign representatives told me they couldn't give any details such as what specific day McCain was coming, or where he would be. They weren't even returning my calls.

Still more frustrating, the campaign had apparently given some of my local Republican sources explicit instructions not to talk to me on the record. Off the record, a couple of those sources told me they didn't like it any more than I did.

Recently, however, I got some insight into why the campaign did that.

Last week, I wrote about John McCain's visit to the York Expo Center, but I didn't write a lot about my ride on his campaign bus, the "Straight Talk Express." So here goes.

As a journalist, I'm supposed to sneer at the mere idea of manipulating public opinion during political campaigns.

The truth is, I kind of get a kick out of it. I enjoy it in the same way I enjoy watching a con job movie like "House of Games," for example, or a masterful sleight-of-hand artist who can pull off seeming miracles with misdirection and patter.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that trying to make a candidate look good is inherently deceitful. That's what campaigns do. I don't habitually wear a suit, but I wear one when I show up for a job interview. Does that make me deceitful?

To be perfectly frank, I see more insincerity in the frequent expressions by members of the public and many of my colleagues in the news media to the effect that they are shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that these campaigns would present their candidate in a positive light and the opponent in a negative one.

Then again, maybe it's not insincerity so much as a willful refusal to see the obvious.