The media live in a parallel universe of their own design.

Don't call it a comeback, he's been there for a year...

Assholes. I blame the 24-hour news cycle.

Ahhh, but the media's hunger for an historic moment like electing the the country's African American president would take precedence over the "comeback" of a 72 year old white male. At least to me it seems like a bigger story.

Except Obama is back up to +10 in Gallup today.

Mike Allen at Politico.com said McCain campaign was hitting the panic button not the reset button, but that comment disappeared from his revised story.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/McCain_hits_reset.html?showall

Must not have fit the new media narrative.

It led Drudge, among others, to start touting the notion of a McCain "comeback." (Obama's lead in the Gallup tracking poll bounced back to 10 today, but this has not led Drudge or anyone else to write about an Obama "resurgence.")

Drudge is a partisan hack and gossip columnist masquerading as a journalist? You don't say.

What worries me is if "the media" and the pundits get bored with Obama ahead by 10,11,12 points and decide the Ayers thing is worth airtime. I think McCain's people (not McCain, he doesn't know what the hell is going on) are counting on their Ayers insistence to get attention from someone besides Fox and the need for a new story about might be that opening.

This only happens once and awhile: I hope I'm wrong.

Besides their well-known love of John McCain, the media want a race, so they can be counted on to cheer on any indication, however specious, that the race is tightening.

The whole country is in love with the notion of a 'comeback'--no doubt about it.

But no comeback can be a STAYback if he doesn't have what it takes.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Can it be agreed by all McCain needs a game changer? An Obama gaffe won't do. Nor will even the most plausible and interesting bit of slanderous gossip. Nor can he wait or depend on outside events or actors to generate one. So, what does he do? What can he set in motion, what uproar or doubt can he create or instigate not already attempted. Something BIG. What lies around the bend?

McCain "comeback" stories also dovetail nicely with the "Obama can't close the deal with voters" stories. Since news stories are a fungible asset, however, the latest poll numbers could also be used to write and report "Obama has closed the deal with voters" stories. Perhaps the Obama campaign and its surrogates should start pushing that story into the media narrative.

Touting a race is the easiest way for the corporate media to sell copy. So any freebies they can get from Drudge, Politico, and any other online right-wing sources of disinformation, will help their cause.

Also, as long as they are touting that there is a race, perhaps they can justify selling lots of airtime to the candidates, and fairly high rates.

I suspect though, given their declining influence, coupled with most Americans having decided long ago who they are going to vote for, that this really isn't going to go very far.

According to http://www.electoral-vote.com - the number of states trending strongly towards Obama translates to 235 EVs alone. When you factor in the weak trends (47 EVs), the election is pretty much over. Any thing on top that is icing for the Obama cake.

How's THIS for a narrative? Middle America is so sick of getting screwed by Republicans, they're defecting from a man oft-hailed as a war hero, and flocking towards someone who's not only a relative newcomer to national politics, he's black! AND many of middle America's neighbors are getting inundated with emails and robocalls and ignorant neighbors who will swear up and down this black novice politician is an "arab" and a Muslim and a terrorist and anti-American with an angry anti-American wife and shady ties to former terrorists & radical preachers. And even with all that noise, people STILL prefer him over the white "war hero."

For some reason, that strikes ME as a more interesting narrative. But I'm over 35, so I'm out of the target demo, I don't matter.

If reporters could point to a sustained boost in the polls and other tangible, quantifiable metrics, then obviously that's a story worth reporting.

Yeah--but only about 2% as much as they would report on it. And that goes for Obama as well as McCain "boosts."

It's an insult to the hard-working scribes at the Daily Racing Form to call election news as it stands "horse-race coverage." Coverage of actual horse racing tends to take the form of accounts of who has already won or lost, or similarly factual and quantifiable things. The people whose job it is to make things look artificially competitive are called oddsmakers, and they don't get to write columns that masquerade as objective journalism.

McCain is still at the airport, waiting for his ship to come in.

Ah, welcome to campaign season, where all the reporters are below average.

Though it's nice to see Adam Nagourney admit what we all know: that the media has a "tendency to find the 'Republican is surging' story line irresistible."

Two points, during this campaign Gallup's tracking poll has consistently moved to McCain on weekends. The shift is a polling artifact.

Second, and most important, Obama just gave a game changing speech on the economy in Toledo. He comes off sounding more like FDR than Al Gore. The Toledo speech should suck all the air out of the McCain "comeback."

Only in our fucked up media could the white, war-hero Sentor of 26 years be considered an underdog up against a black first-term Senator.

Just because he's getting his ass kicked in the fourth quarter it doesn't make him an underdog.

It's an upset loss, to be sure, but McCain's no underdog.

Along the lines of what Slappy wrote above, what's a better "comeback" story than "America is on the comeback, after 8 dark years under Bush, the nation begins recovery process with Obama"?

And is THAT why this nation has been subjected to 8 years of Bush misrule? Because the media thought it would be boring to write about Gore's "triumphal march to the White House" and started to root for the underdog?

One other thing: if the media needs something to write about while Obama's building a double-digit lead, maybe they could put on their little fact-finding hats and WRITE ABOUT SOME FUCKING POLICY ISSUES.

Ideally, with some accurate numbers, inferences, and quotes from relevant people -- though if they haven't figured out how to do that by *now*, it may well be beyond their abilities.

Because as much as the world needs another "How can McCain get back in the game?" piece of horse-race horse-shit, the world could *also* use more voters knowing more about the issues, and even if one campaign and one nation's media are single-mindedly intent on *not* helping with that (really, CNN, covering every Palin speech live while you treat Biden like he's in the Witness Protection Program? What the fuck?), it doesn't make it a good, smart, or helpful thing to do.

Unless, of course, you're sociopathically indifferent to events and effects in the real world.

Which, actually, is far more likely than it should be.

Obama's back down to 4 in Reuters. This race is not over. McCain reminds me of the terminator. You just can't wipe him out. He's always right back atcha, you betcha.

Has the financial meltdown bottomed out? That had as much to do with Obama's surge as anything else, didn't it?

We'll see. McCain surged prior to the convention, remember, for no reason at all. You gotta keep blasting away at this guy, or he'll getcha, you betcha.

McCain is still at the airport, waiting for his ship to come in. Posted by: Dennis - SGMM

A little, meaningless fact. My friend the pilot was at Midway on Sunday. Saw Obama's plane (he'd seen McCain's in Denver the week before and "saluted" it). Obama's is bigger. His plane, that is.

Chris Bowers called out the Washington Post for this same nonsense. States in which Obama led by as much as THIRTEEN PERCENT were labeled "battleground states" and states in which McCain led by 2-3 percent were labeled "leaning Republican." The bias couldn't be any more naked.

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9018

Maybe Cokie Roberts didn't get the comeback memo. On Morning Edition today she called the race for Obama unless there is an event equivalent to the current financial crisis that McCain can capitalize on.

How can it be a "comeback" when McCain and Palin are spending time in Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, states they should have wrapped up by now, and the poll of polls shows Obama up by eight, his largest lead yet? "We report the facts, then ignore them."

Another thing to consider is that prematurely calling something a comeback is risky when the numbers don't support it.

If they spend the next two days talking up a comeback and Obama gains in the polls, they just look like fools.

I'm curious to see what statisticians say, but I bet it'll be called noise and Obama will be back up in double digits by the debate which will seal the deal.

the hotline diageo daily tracking poll had obama up 7 points a week or so ago. suddenly mccain closed within 2 points, and the people doing the analysis went crazy, saying it was because mccain had gained with this group of voters, obama lost of that group. the poll stayed the same for another day, and another round of analysis. the day after that, it returned to a seven point margin where it has pretty much stayed since.

absent a major event, a gaff of some sort, the numbers aren't going to change that quickly. the problem is the people who take the polls want to take them too seriously rather than look at their work with a bit of skepticism. and yeah, there's always somebody in the press willing to lap it up, especially given the plethora of outlets and the 24-hour news cycle. toss in reporters' bent for a good story and all of a sudden mccain is "surging."

Anybody who didn't see this exact media storyline coming, whether or not it is backed up by reality, is naive in the extreme. Wanna bet that McCain will be declared the debate winner by the media, regardless of what the insta-polls say?

So if Obama announces that HE's the underdog, and alerts the media that HE's about to give a "new" speech consisting primarily of sewn-togather parts from his acceptance speech, then I guess the cables and nets will give HIM wall to wall live coverage. Right?

For some reason, that strikes ME as a more interesting narrative.

Me, too, magoo. But look at it this way: We'll remember 2008 as the year the MSM kept doing exactly what it always does and the electorate quietly went about its business doing something else.

We wrote our own headline, didn't we?

What’s behind Drudge? Supposedly, Schmuck Talk is going to can or demote Schmidt as his next campaign stunt, and Drudge is paving the way for that.

First, he won’t actually can him; see Hillary Clinton and Mark Penn.

Second, even if he were serious, things like this don’t change elections anyway. The typical voter doesn’t pay that much attention to inside baseball.

They're starting to sound like the old quarterback who never lost a game. He just ran out of time.

So the media admit they don't care for the democratic process and prefer to serve their interests over the nation's. Why am I not surprised.

Now, if they can only provide ONE instance where they did that to help out the Democratic candidate who was behind. Just ONE!