Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”Greg Sargent remembers it differently:
My personal experience of the Obama campaign is a bit at odds with this. Politico was treated like royalty by the Obama camp, which lavished a steady stream of leaks on the upstart website. Politico got more love from the Obama camp than the liberal blogs did, for instance -- even though the liberal blogs were going after John McCain way more aggressively than Politico was.And I remember Obama staffers getting pretty worked up about what did and didn't appear on The Page.
Which staffers? The role that Politico and The Page play is the same inside campaigns and outside campaigns: They're for information junkies. And plenty of folks inside campaigns have far less information than they'd like. So it's possible that some levels of the staff were deeply dependent on the Page, while the campaign's strategic class dismissed of their relevance. It was certainly Conventional Wisdom in DC that the McCain campaign was much more focused on "winning the day" than was the Obama campaign, though it was never quite clear to me how one differed from the other.Even so, it's good if the principals around Obama have some mental distance from these outlets. Mark Schmitt has noted -- but keeps not writing -- that one of the signature changes in campaign journalism is how much more is intra-Washington as compared to a decade ago. In 2000, there were fairly few outlets that mainly transcribed communications between journalists and political professionals and rival campaigns. Inside Politics had that reputation, and maybe The Hotline. Now there are a dozen of them. The Page and the Note and the Playbook and Politico and Election Central a handful of others are conduits for political communication that cater to audiences largely centered around the professional and quasi-professional political class.Their crucial insight is that politicos want a lot more political news than there actually is. And so they produce more political news. Small conflagrations -- a nasty ad, say, or a flack's gaffe -- become daylong, or maybe only afternoon-long -- stories. That couldn't happen before because no outlets had a production schedule that could support a story that updated 12 times in eight hours and then faded away. If the beginning of rapid amateur political commentary was Instapundit, these are Consta-pundits. And a campaign can easily get caught doing nothing but responding and retaliating and jockeying for those instant bursts of feedback. It's a way of seeming to win when no one is voting. But you don't actually win that way.
