TheAgitator.com
You Make the Call!
Saturday, October 4th, 2008The McCain campaign had another Internet fail, apparently sending this unfinished ad to the Washington Post early Friday morning:
Now watch conservative commentator Peggy Noonan, shortly after Thursday night’s debate:
So was this a harmless error by a McCain campaign techie? Or did the McCain camp send out pre-written quotes to friendly commentators?
Agitator readers, you make the call.
MORE: Those of you expressing your profound disappointment in me for even daring to suggest that the McCain campaign could possibly have sent out pre-written quotes might want to keep in mind that the McCain campaign did exactly that before the first debate. McCain put out an ad with a pre-written quote from his own campaign manager declaring victory hours before the first debate had even started.
Maybe that’s not how it happened this time. But it’s really not all that farfetched. So spare me the indignation at my having even suggested such a thing.
McCain’s people just can’t stop fucking up. What the hell is going on with his organization? Does he have some kind of Obama infiltrator that is conspiring against him? All snide remarks put a side, these are the most undisciplined, unprofessional, half assed group of people and they are destroying their candidate.
As mad as I am about his policies and everything else, I’m even more pissed of that they aren’t even good bullshit artists. Because I think it is a reflection of how stupid that they the American public is. And that is really insulting.
[...] Oops. The Agitator » Blog Archive » You Make the Call! [...]
“Because I think it is a reflection of how stupid they *think* the American public is.” Can’t even type I’m so pissed. And I didn’t even spell *off* right. The comments didn’t exactly flow very well either. Fuck it, I’ll blame McCain for that too.
Let me get this straight. You think that this might show that they sent out quotes to friendly commentators because the ad has the quote but not the name. Correct? But this would imply that they sent out the same quotes to multiple friendly commentators (and thus did not know which one would repeat the quote). But that would be profoundly dangerous, because multiple commentators might repeat the same quotes.
Look. Peggy said it Thursday night. Then on Friday morning this was sent out. The timing fits.
Most likely possibility: they were using a template, and they filled out the quote part but they forgot to fill out the who-said-it part.
Sadly she did kill . . . the English language.
I think it’s probably just another example of sloppy incompetence by McCain staff. I know that campaign activity goes so fast it’s hard to keep control of everything (and we all make mistakes), but it doesn’t seem that there’s a firm hand supervising the campaign.
As far as the quote itself, regardless of how it came to be, it appears to be an intentionally quote-ready statement by Noonan. It’s review-jargon, just like you see in movie or theatre reviews, where the reviewer, either because he wants the show to do well, or because he knows he’ll get more visibility/payoff by being in the quote ads, intentionally packages glowing sound-bite quotes.
In just world Peggy Noonan would be exposed as a hack she is with this. When I was growing up the kind of things Pravda did was supposed to be offensive and what separated us from the evil Soviets.
Pfeh. This is really more of a molehill than a mountain. Initially reading the blog post, I thought Noonan’s clip must have somehow been after the ad was sent, but it was the other way around, just as it would normally be.
It’s not impossible that something fishy was going on here – it always is – but there’s no evidence to support that here. The obvious explanation that the campaign had a template for the ad and was careless in filling it out is more than sufficient, barring something more substantial pointing to something else.
If there’s anything damning to the McCain campaign here it’s that they couldn’t dig up a better endorsement of Palin’s performance. Noonan has some talent as a writer, but that quote sounds like it was culled from a gushing theater review in a high school paper. But, both Palin and Biden were as unimpressive in the debate as the McCain and Obama campaigns have been all along, so I guess the endorsements are appropriately mediocre.
I’ve always liked Famous Person and I respect his/her opinions. He/She was so good in Popular Movie. I even liked her/his appearance on Talk Show.
* McCain, as the candidate of the Stupid Party, deserves to lose for voting $700,000,000,000 to China.
* Obama, as the candidate of the Evil Party, deserves to President when the socialist-welfare state goes bankrupt thoroughly and completely as the $54 trillion dollar credit-default-swap derivatives debt monster eats the world alive & screaming, ushering in Great Depression II.
Not even the combined forces of the Justice League and the Powerpuff Girls can stop it now.
* Congress? Tahnks, Jackoffs. It deserves to burn to the ground.
(Thanks, Tanks, Tahnks….what’s the difference? Feh….)
Distribution of talking points has been around for a couple of decades, Mr. Balko. The Clintons made an art of using faxes and e-mails to most US and foreign news outlets. I’m surprised that you are surprised.
chsw
Radley,
This is pretty standard marketing stuff. I imagine that nearly every campaign works that way for efficiency’s sake with ads. You have six words to work with; it’s not like re-writing the Federalist papers.
Radley,
I can appreciate your disdain for Palin and McCain. They do deserve all the criticism they are getting. But I have noticed in the past several months that you’re running about 98% against them, and maybe 2% against Obama and Biden.
I’ll put good money up to wager that two years from now, when Obama’s administration is trashing your own liberties more than you thought possible in such a short time period, you’ll look back at all these postings and wonder why you had next to nothing to say about them.
I just don’t get you on this. You recognize so many outrages against individual rights, but you’ve got a huge blind spot once there is an election, I think.
Just resolve to stay home every election day (as a matter of respecting your neighbors’ rights, i.e., not giving any politician the permission to violate said rights). After a couple of elections have passed, you’ll learn to ignore the hype and see them as as the rotten bastards they are. And, you’ll lose any desire to pick sides.
McCain as Gollum
Best bit about 2:20 in.
It always amazes me how intellectual honesty and integrity go out the door when election time rolls around. We all know what a template is, and “She Killed, It was her evening. She was the star.” likely had “Really great quote about how well she did.” shortly before it was sent out.
[...] Radley Balko, who wonders… “was this a harmless error by a McCain campaign techie? Or did the McCain camp send out [...]
This is yet another post that makes me question Radley Balko’s political maturity. For a journalist at a magazine, this should be obvious for what it is – a template for an ad where one of the template text items (the name of the famous person) was not updated when the ad was submitted. To turn that into a political attack questioning if the McCain campaign is writing columnists’ leads is ridiculous.
[...] But I feel naive doubting it. [...]
GB FL is absolutely correct — it’s a freaking TEMPLATE.
But will The Agitator correct the “white lie” that it’s not?
Experience leads me to conclude no — and that’s a shame, because it’s just another step down the road to debasement of integrity.
#19 and #21 — If you think I have no integrity, go elsewhere.
No one is forcing you to read this site.
As I explained in the update, the McCain campaign had no problem sending out pre-written quotes from its own campaign manager declaring victory before the first debate even started.
There’s plenty of reason to question if this was more than merely forgetting to an attribution to the ad.
Pre-written quotes from a campaign manager are completely different than a columnist being given the lead to an article. Again, it points to a certain lack of political maturity to equate the two.
I don’t know much about Peggy Noonan, but I suspect she’s an egotistical enough writer that she wouldn’t use someone else’s words as hers. And, while the WSJ might be in the tank for McCain, I doubt they’d take the credibility hit of letting the McCain campaign write their articles (Noonan’s words in the youtube video are used almost verbatim in her WSJ column: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122300786229301597.html).
It simply doesn’t pass the basic credibility test that this ad is evidence of pre-written quotes being fed to journalists.
All that said, I like reading this blog, mainly for its niche of pointing out police abuses. When it strays into other political commentary, I find it less insightful.
Yeah, I doubt it because of Noonan’s integrity, not McCain’s. McCain’s campaign absolutely would do something like this, but Noonan is hardly that much of a hack. She’s already annoyed the McCain campaign for her leaked comments on Palin, and she’s written columns that don’t toe the party line. Now if it was Hewitt or Savage or one of those shills, I’d believe it.
Hey Radley. New to posting here, but I’ve stopped by on and off for a while now.
Not much to add, other than the problem that McCain faces is that it’s not that difficult to believe they would have done something like this, considering their earlier screwup with the debate.
Plus, although this certainly COULD have been a template error, I’d say it was mighty convenient that Noonan supplied a quote that neatly fit into the template’s copy-space. The quote wound up just long enough to be meaty, yet not so long that the font size had to be shrunk to a too-small size. Not to mention the absolute incompetence of whoever would have updated the template – they put in the quote and the date of the quote, but not the name of the person who made the quote? Frankly, this is where I start to have a problem with anyone claiming it’s an error in the template.
Regardless, there’s no way we’ll ever know for sure. Noonan certainly would never admit to it, and neither would anyone in McCain’s camp.
I should clarify – when I said it isn’t that hard to believe McCain’s camp could have done something like this, I was referring to the possibility that someone basically gave Noonan those lines to use when she provided commentary on the debate.
I like to think Noonan is not capable of such a thing. I was a huge fan. But after hearing her trash Palin (justifiably) off-camera during the convention, and watching her since overcompensate with awkward, forced admiration for Palin in order to make it up to the angry republican base, I’m not so sure. That write-up of Palin’s performance did not strike me as totally honest. I believe Noonan, a smart and accomplished woman, cannot truly respect a dimweed like Palin. But she cannot afford to lose all her readers by telling the total truth either…..
Incorrect. She is that much of a hack. She has a well-deserved reputation for touting the GOP every chance she gets, then being more honest in private exchanges (one of which was revealed on TV some weeks back.
Hack. Total hack. A shill. A fraud.
There’s one other possibility for this ad which hasn’t been mentioned here.
McCain staffer has quote, but not the source of the quote. The ad is ginned up with the former whilst (s)he seeks the latter; the ad goes out without the completion.