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I find the purity of my dislike for Mitt Romney is basically being overwhelmed by my discomfort with the press corps' white-hot hatred for the guy.
It had been a long time coming. In Michigan, the frustration over Romney's complete disingeniousness about "bringing your jobs back" conjured a rare degree of camaraderie, and we caucused together and came up with a list of questions that we agreed to ask no matter who got called on at the next press conference. For instance: "If Bain Capital was going to invest in the auto industry, what segment would it invest in, and how would that help Michigan?"Seriously, the press was driven over the edge by a presidential candidate promising to bring jobs back? Give me a break. If McCain promised to drive his Straight Talk Express directly into GM's corporate lobby, force the American auto CEOs into a room, and tell them to "cut the bullshit and give everyone their jobs back," the press would swoon over his plan. "Finally," we'd hear, "a president willing to jawbone industry into line with the national interest." Romney's jobs rhetoric is stupid. But it's a common campaign lie, and one the press never, ever rebels against. They hate Romney, though, and so he's getting an uncommon level of scrutiny. Read, for instance, this bizarre dust-up with Romney over lobbyists. Romney said he won't let lobbyists run his campaign. The press browbeat him on the language, saying lobbyists do run his campaign. Romney insisted that his campaign manager is no lobbyist. There's video of this exchange, and the contempt on the part of the journalist is really fascinating to watch. But check out the resulting news story. The article is vicious to Romney's claims, showing that journalists can, when so moved, easily identify prevarication. And then we get this:
Attempting to shift the focus off Romney, Madden pointed out that Sen. John McCain frequently complains about special interests and Washington lobbyists "yet those representing them run his campaign."McCain, however, has never said he won't work with lobbyists or that they do not work in his campaign. McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, is a former lobbyist and his firm has not lobbied for any client since December 2005.So McCain, who has built a career around "straight talk," campaign finance reform, and fighting special interests ("I make a lot of people in Washington mad," he says in his commercials) actually has a lobbyist campaign manager. But this doesn't matter, we're told, because unlike Romney, he hasn't said he doesn't have a lobbyist campaign manager. He's just been able to get the press to report on him as if he were pure as the driven snow and animated by a deep hatred of corporate interests and the whole corrupt, is irrelevant.The difference between Romney and McCain is that the press hates Romney for lying to them, while McCain has figured out how to get them to lie for him.
