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Obama Wars Title: Why the MSM loves Palin Why the MSM loves Palin By: Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin February 12, 2010 06:49 AM EST Fox News has been making a serious charge about mainstream political reporters: They hate Sarah Palin. This is not just wrong, it’s absurd. The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin. And if Palin does not exactly love us, she’s smart enough to recognize how quickly reporters devour every provocative remark she utters. She knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics. It’s a tangled, symbiotic affair — built on mutual dependency and mutual enabling. For the media, Palin is great at the box office. Among modern American political figures, she is second only to Barack Obama in generating clicks (for Web sites such as this one) and ratings (for the cable news networks hungering around the clock for fresh material). For Palin, the benefit is the exposure she needs to maintain her public profile and stir up chatter about a potential presidential candidacy — both of which help her continue to rake in millions of dollars in speaking fees. She also gets a villain with which to further energize her supporters: The more she convinces them “the MSM” hates her, the more they love her. The problem is that this relationship — what in Hollywood they call being “frenemies” — treats Palin as though she were the central figure in the politics of 2012. No realistic appraisal of Palin’s current strengths and weaknesses or of the history of Republican politics suggests that this is necessarily true. A new poll out Thursday should make those of us in the media take a look in the mirror and ask: Should we really be giving so much attention to somebody who faces so many hurdles to becoming president or even the GOP nominee in 2012? According to the Washington Post/ABC survey, she is viewed favorably by 37 percent of Americans, while 55 percent view her unfavorably. That’s what pollsters call being “upside down,” which for an incumbent would usually spell defeat. Furthermore, only a quarter of those polled said Palin was qualified to be president — and 71 percent said she was not. What’s more, 52 percent of self-identified Republicans — more than half — said she wasn’t qualified to be president. Similar polls of Republicans don’t place her first nationally. At this early stage of the race, it's the "undecided" option that polls highest. Also still strong is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Remember him? You wouldn’t know it from the coverage, but some Republicans still prefer him to Palin. Take a recent poll of Republicans in Alabama, a deeply conservative state where Palin should be strong. Huckabee leads her by 10 percentage points there. Beyond polls, consider this: If Palin were to announce a bid for the White House, how many party officials would support her? Would a single governor or senator get behind her candidacy? More than 10 House members? And how about donors — how many of the bundlers who seeded President Bush’s two campaigns would do the same for her? Before you can scream “but those are just elites!” recall the traditions of the GOP. Yes, she could mount an insurgency and run against the power brokers in Washington and the state capitals who traditionally control the nominating process. But has that ever happened in the modern history of the Republican Party? Just ask Presidents Huckabee (2008) McCain (2000), Buchanan (’92 and ’96) and Robertson (’88). But how about Reagan, Palin’s supporters might respond. Yes, he was the conservative outsider in 1976 (when he lost, as did all GOP presidential contenders). But he was also a two-term governor of America’s largest state who worked diligently between that year and his successful run in 1980 to court the media and convert his opponents, holding scores of news conferences and interviews and even stumping for such Ford supporters as James A. Baker III in the 1978 cycle. With a cadre of political and policy operatives around him, he launched detailed attacks on President Carter over wonky issues such as arms control, detente and the Panama Canal via policy speeches, a syndicated column and a daily radio program. In short, he did the opposite of what Palin is doing now. Don’t believe us — read conservative Craig Shirley’s new book about the 1980 election, “Rendezvous with Destiny.” Could Palin raise money somehow other than by leaning on deep-pocketed donors to persuade them to bundle checks from their friends and clients? Absolutely. But even Obama’s fundraising juggernaut — described in the mythology of the ’08 election as a machine built on small-dollar contributions — was a product of wealthy donors and industry. She didn’t exactly make a major push, but Palin’s PAC haul last year was not, for somebody of her celebrity, all that impressive. She raised just over $2 million in 2009 and started the year with less than $1 million on hand. By comparison, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty raised $1.3 million in just the final three months of the year, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hauled in nearly $3 million last year. As for party support, most GOP officials and operatives are loath to discuss Palin on the record. When a reporter forces them to speak about her, as one of us did last November at a Republican Governors Association conference, it tends to provoke much staring at shoes, hemming and hawing and ultimately some form of praise about the “energy” she brings to the party. During an interview last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney, asked about rising talent in the GOP, didn’t even mention Palin’s name until prompted — a pattern among senior Republicans. The recent book “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin even reported that Cheney told friends that John McCain’s selection of her as running mate was a “reckless choice." In Virginia and New Jersey last fall, neither Republican gubernatorial candidate even wanted her in his state, for fear images of them with the polarizing Palin would scare moderate voters. (When asked about his arm's-length approach, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell offered the tortured rationale that his schedule of surrogate campaigners was set months in advance.) The hope among GOP elites is that she’ll keep annoying liberals, raise money for the party — and stay out of the 2012 sweepstakes. A National Journal survey — an imperfect measurement, to be sure — of some of the party’s top strategists illustrated this point. Palin finished fifth among those Republicans the operatives thought would win the party’s nomination — behind Romney and Pawlenty, as well as Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. So why, given her poll standing and the history of the GOP, is she covered so intensely? The bitter pill to swallow is that the Palin obsession says as much about the modern media as it does about the state of American politics right now: We just can’t quit her. To understand the Palin-media love affair, consider her address last weekend at a tea party convention in Nashville. Every major news outlet had reporters covering her speech to 600 tea party activists. CNN had a crew of 11 working the event and, along with the other cable news networks, carried her address live. The speech itself was unremarkable, largely a red-meat regurgitation of the sort of sound-byte-friendly attacks and folksy witticisms she has offered many times before. Similarly, her “disclosure” to Chris Wallace the next morning on “Fox News Sunday” was nothing new — she’s said before she was open to running for president in 2012. Still, both the speech and the appearance on Wallace’s show generated headlines everywhere. The New York Times and The Washington Post both carried Page 1 stories on Sunday about the speech and the convention, while three of the broadcast networks carried reports on their evening newscasts Monday, some with correspondents reporting from Nashville. Palin has also received more attention thanks to Fox News Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon’s claim Sunday morning that the MSM hates her and the tea parties. By week's end, David Broder was talking up her appeal in his Washington Post column, and Time magazine was blasting Joe Klein’s column declaring her the front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2012. Trust us, Broder’s columns on deficit reduction and Klein’s pieces on Obama don’t get circulated around town like those two Palin columns did. The fact is, she’s a draw. The left loves to mock her, the right rushes to defend her and folks in between seem to be fascinated by the whole spectacle. We see it at POLITICO. Whenever there is a Palin story or blog post — and, yes, there have been many — the comments pile up in a way that they do on almost no other topic. And her impact on the airwaves is as significant. When Palin kicked off her book tour with an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show — a program that never has trouble attracting an audience — the former governor delivered the Queen of Talk her highest ratings in two years. When Palin made her debut as a Fox News analyst last month on “The O’Reilly Factor,” the cable network got 3.9 million viewers — demolishing the competition. And about that speech at the tea party convention? The ratings were nearly double what Fox usually draws for a Saturday evening. We know we’re part of the problem — and we’ll surely continue to run stories about Palin. But — we’re looking at you, top newspaper editors and network executives — listen to your grumbling political reporters when they try to tell you why going overboard on the Hockey Mom beat isn’t wise. Palin is no doubt a phenomenon — she's going to draw monster crowds and be an in-demand fundraiser for GOP candidates this fall. And she may overcome her weaknesses to make a run for the White House. But to cover her as the chief alternative to Obama and the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2012 borders on the dishonest. Yes, she’s good copy and yes she’s good for business. But that doesn’t mean she should be treated as a president-in-waiting.
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