Framing and Pushback

DP has a very good roundup of the speeches from last night below. I think he said it better than I could, so check that out for a recap of the night’s speeches. I’ll just throw in a couple of thoughts of my own.

Like DP, one of the things that has frustrated me about this election cycle is the fact that the Obama campaign even has to take the time to prove that Obama is a normal American and not a scary, creepy unknown. I think this is something the media really should have put down before it got around so much. When McCain and McCain surrogates say that Obama has put his own ambition before his country, the press corps needs to call them out on it. It is simply absurd to think that anyone would go through the exhausting, expensive process of running for president while they harbor a secret hatred for the United States and the things the US stands for. McCain, Fox News, talk radio and the rest of them can go on and on about it – it’s what they do, and it isn’t anything we shouldn’t expect. But the other cable networks, the three big networks and especially newspapers should feel a responsibility to not allow themselves to be a transmission vector for this garbage. It’s not true and everyone who’s paying attention knows it’s not true. Unfortunately, the Republicans are adept at gaming the message. Twisting the framing of a narrative is really the only thing they’ve got left. Michelle Obama’s speech last night was a definite attempt to push back, and a successful one, I think.

While I understand what the Democrats were setting out to do last night, I can also understand why so many have felt underwhelmed by the tone tonight. There wasn’t a whole lot of attacking. One thing I think is tough for the Democrats is going on the attack. Voters and especially the media, are used to Republicans on the attack: conservatives are nothing without their false sense of victimhood and a strange other to attack. Matt Yglesias says there certainly could have been both the Obama boosterism with a couple of shots at McCain thrown in for good measure. I agree, I would like to have seen some more shots at McCain directly. Hopefully, the next couple of nights will see some more of that, after the warm fuzzies of last night.