Politico and the Art of the One-Sided Story

As we've already noted, the Associated Press illegally obtained a copy of Gov. Palin's book to give themselves and others a chance to misreport it and put a negative spin on it before she could legally reply. Predictably, among the "others" following suit with a hatchet piece is Politico, which saw fit to run a completely one-sided piece by Andy Barr (what, was Jonathan Martin busy?) giving the McCain campaign point of view unchallenged and unbalanced by any countervailing comments, facts, or observations.

Of course, they can't admit to having done so, which leads to perhaps the most galling single line in the story, its final line: "Palin did not respond to a request for comment." Of course she didn't, as she couldn't, as they knew she couldn't when they made the request—she's currently embargoed from commenting on the book because of contracts negotiated for interviews that have not yet run. (One suspects Oprah's not very happy with the AP at this point.) Their request for comment was a pure sham. Had Barr actually been interested in doing anything other than writing an utterly slanted attack piece, he wouldn't have contacted Gov. Palin, he would have contacted Randy Scheunemann, Steve Biegun and other McCain campaign staffers who stayed loyal to Gov. Palin (when Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace decided to try to blame the failure of the campaign on her instead of taking it themselves) and asked them what they remembered. But Barr didn't want to do that—it might have called the credibility of his hit piece into question.

Which is exactly what it deserves. Though the bulk of his quotes come from the self-justifying Mark Salter, Salter doesn't actually contradict what we've seen of Gov. Palin's book—he simply offers a lot of carefully-phrased consultant-speak. For it to sound like Salter is attacking her, Barr needed a rhetorical body blow, which Salter could then seem to be reinforcing. As such, people can take Salter's quotes as meaning more than he actually said, which is disingenuous at best on Barr's part.

More disingenuous is the source of Barr's body blow, which comes a quote from "former McCain strategist John Weaver." In fact, this is worse than merely disingenuous, because Barr lets the uninformed reader assume that Weaver was with the campaign when Palin arrived; he doesn't talk about the fact that Weaver became a former McCain strategist in the summer of 2007—nor does he mention why that was. For that, consider what David Brooks wrote in February 2008:

The staff of the McCain campaign had a rude awakening last Jan. 25th. They opened The Washington Post and found a front-page story linking McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, to the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Who, some wondered, was feeding damaging information about Davis to the press?

Speculation inevitably settled, as it must in McCain World, upon John Weaver. For nearly a decade, stories about the inner workings of the McCain apparatus inevitably involved the Weaver-Davis rivalry. These two McCain advisers share a mutual hatred, one McCainiac told me Thursday, that is total, absolute and blinding.

The tensions, which divided the McCain presidential campaign until Weaver was forced out last summer, exist on many levels. . . .

Weaver is a renegade. He has a darker personality.

The occasion for Brooks' column was the story the New York Times ran in February of '08 in which they implied that John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist, and that his behavior with her was politically as well as personally inappropriate.

At the core of that article that began on the front page are two anonymous sources. These sources, according to the article, say they confronted McCain in 1999 with their concerns that he was risking his career by interacting with Vicki Iseman. As a columnist, I’m an independent operator, speaking for myself alone. I have no idea who those sources are. But they are bound to come from the inner circle of the McCain universe. The number of people who could credibly claim to have had a meeting like that with McCain in early 1999 is vanishingly small. I count a small handful of associates with that stature, including Davis and Weaver. There is nobody in that tight circle unaffected by the hostilities that emanate from the rift.

Thursday, as McCain was fervently and completely denying the allegations of an affair with Iseman, people in all quarters of the McCain universe were vehemently denying it, too. But even on this embattled day, they broke down into rival camps over the identity of the sources.

Many in the Davis camp argued Thursday that Weaver must be the chief anonymous source, and that he had roped in one other confederate. He’s had a hard life, they said, and is driven by demons.

Their conclusion was reasonable, with one small correction: Weaver wasn't an anonymous source, he was in fact the only source named in the article. Having been forced out, he publicly contributed to, and probably instigated, a hatchet job on his former boss—a hatchet job so poorly supported that the McCain campaign beat the Times bloody over it, resulting in the interesting spectacle of the NYT's executive editor, Bill Keller, blaming the NYT's readers for the fiasco.

In short, Barr used for the core of his attack on Gov. Palin a source who simply is not credible, both because of his personal track record and because he was long gone from the McCain campaign when Gov. Palin came on the scene. Any competent reporter would have known this—but Weaver's willing to play dirty and he's willing to play nasty, and that's what Barr wanted, so he ran the quotes anyway. Shame on him. And shame on Politico for running it.

And for that matter, shame on Salter and the rest of the McCain staffers (though Weaver is probably beyond shame) for their willingness to be used like this, to the detriment of their party and of their former boss—because the only thing this kind of wrangling does for him is to remind people just how badly his campaign was run—if only it will help them convince a few people that the failure of that campaign was everybody's fault but theirs. Clearly, they're looking out for no one but themselves and no cause but their own, and it's truly pathetic. Dan Riehl has their number:

It's hard to not laugh at these nitwits who ran such a dismal campaign, then spent months blaming Palin from the shadows, having suddenly discovered self-righteous anger so they can start to pop off, again. They should give up professional campaigning, buy up some tents and animals, traveling the back roads of America from now on. At least then people wouldn't cringe when they found out Schmidt's circus was coming to town. Their biggest challenge might be getting Nicole Wallace to grow a beard. But she's made herself over so many times, it might be worth a shot.

Meet the losers behind the loser McCain. Funny that so many people associated with the effort who don't cling to the camera for a living believe they were even worse than the book would seem to make out. If some of the old line politicians are the first people who have to get out of Washington because they stayed too long, they need to pack up their hack consultants incapable of dealing with politics, technology and new media today to run a truly effective campaign.

At least Palin has options and a huge following. These idiots can look forward to running races for drunken Ward bosses and county sheriffs if there's any justice in the world. They don't even appear to know when to shut-up. Not a big surprise, the alleged top guys in the campaign always did seem to be competing with the candidate for media face time. I wonder who they were really working for in the end? If it was McCain, the campaign, their many subsequent excuses and the final result tell you all you need to know about that.

When Riehl calls them "McCain's morons," he's not blowing smoke. In the end, their defense comes down to this: "We're the savvy ones, we're the ones who know how to run a campaign, and Palin was the stupid one who doesn't." Well, given how badly that campaign ended, and given how effectively Gov. Palin has been campaigning against the President's agenda with just a fraction of the resources they had at their command, how credible a position is that, anyway? If it's a contest based on who's proven themselves the more politically effective, who are you going to believe—the guys who went down in flames, or the woman who's still going?