ST. LOUIS -- The clearest sign that things didn't go well for the Bush camp in the town hall debate here in overcast Missouri came in the campaign's flood of post-debate round-ups. Starting last night and continuing throughout today, the “What They're Saying” missives tried to gin up an increasingly creaky right-wing noise machine but in the end wound up making the campaign look anything but well-oiled. For the first time in presidential history, the casual musings of right-winger bloggers were the campaign's first line of defense when trying to convince the national, non-partisan press corps that their candidate delivered a stellar and convincing debate win.
You know things have run badly off-track when the Bush-Cheney campaign, which will have spent more than $200 million by the time it's done, is reduced to citing Kathryn Jean Lopez' thoughts posted on National Review Online's blog, The Corner, as evidence of a comeback. But they did. They also sent along positive quotes from National Review editor Rich Lowry -- made on right-wing news network FOX News, no less! -- along with Andrew Sullivan's stylistic musings from AndrewSullivan.com and several quotes from The New York Times' op-ed page's house conservative David Brooks. Brooks, of course, used to hang his hat at the Weekly Standard, and the Bushies clearly didn't want to play favorites between the country's top two conservative magazines; they also sent out Bush-approving quotes from the Standard's Steven Hayes. And then they couldn't leave out National Review's professional anti-gay marriage polemicist Stanley Kurtz, FOX News' Chris Wallace, and The New York Post's Andrea Peyser. Even former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan was brought into the mix of quotes, though he was described as an “MSNBC analyst” by the Bush campaign.
If the Kerry campaign did the equivalent and flooded the non-partisan national press with a post-debate bolus of approving citations from The Nation, The Progressive, DailyKos.com, and Jim Hightower, they'd be laughed at on every Sunday talk show in America. Doing something like this is a sign that the Bush campaign is increasingly desperate or increasingly insular -- or possibly both.
Traditionally, the post-debate spin wars result in a flood of citations from major newspapers, TV stations, and magazines letting the rest of the press know who thought what and where, and trying to show the candidate in the best possible light. The Kerry campaign, for example, kept its focus on quotes from major media outlets, such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN. Campaigns sometimes focus on local media when they want to make a point about what, for example, voters in Ohio or Arizona are likely to be reading. But the Bush campaign has done something truly unusual in focusing so heavily on the win/loss thoughts of the ideological media. Granted, some of the people they cited, such as Sullivan and Buchanan, are well-known Bush skeptics. But including their quotes only reminds other reporters that George W. Bush has alienated many members of his natural base and -- for one night, at least -- managed to impress them.
Bush clearly helped himself last night by quelling doubts among his supporters, many of whom were worried by his wobbly debate performance in Miami. But John Kerry still managed to edge him in the insta-polls, and among the critical demographics of undecided voters and independents, according to polling by Democratic pollsters from Democracy Corps, Kerry beat Bush by statistically and electorally significant margins.
Spin alley and the media filing center in St. Louis were, for a change, both held in the same room -- a cavernous gymnasium at the University of Washington -- allowing Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman and other Bush campaign officials to make the rounds and make certain print reporters had everything they needed without even having to rise from their desks. But nothing demonstrates the increasingly collapsed boundaries between press, pundits, and spinners like the Bush campaign's choice of post-debate citations.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at The American Prospect.
