Shuster is the bullet, not the target

With her conflict against MSNBC, Hillary Clinton has revealed one of her central campaign strategies against John McCain, should she get the Democratic nomination. She is attacking McCain's biggest strength, which is his reputation as a truth-tellin' straight-shootin' honest politician.

She's not yet going after McCain's reputation for honesty directly. That will come later. She is starting out by weakening McCain's protective flank: She is undermining the credibility of the media that are forever swooning about McCain's supposedly unimpeachable honesty and forthrightness.

Assailing McCain's honesty is vital strategy. Doing it indirectly, by further weakening voters' trust in the media, is a clever tactic.

The Clinton campaign is deploying David Shuster as a long-range weapon, not as a target. Many in the media fail to understand this, as in this obtuse analysis by ABC's Jake Tapper, who guesses that Clinton "is capitalizing on an ugly moment to galvanize female voters." Sure, there might be an element of trying to stoke the ire of female voters (if you assume, as Tapper does, that only women, and not men, object when accomplished young women are smeared as whores), but the Clinton campaign is hunting for bigger game. They want to persuade voters to distrust the media that instruct them to trust John McCain.

Here's a comment accompanying the Tapper analysis, from a reader who says the media have writing about Clinton with "black colored goggles":

While not many, if any, of the Media's narrative "'points" resemble factual reality, the novelization of the political landscape continues apace. This novelization has burgeoned into an unsupportable, unreadable, and unviewable fictionalization of campaign and the candidates.

It is and has been for months outright well-poisoning. The media's fictionalizing is not just a disservice to the country but an outright betrayal of the public trust.

When I turn on the news I want the NEWS, the FACTS. I don't want a narrative, I don't want to hear what you think would be fun or interesting IF it were what was happening. I want narrative, I'll read a book or watch a movie.

This is conclusion that the Clinton campaign wants voters to make. This isn't about David Shuster or the locker-room atmosphere on MSNBC. This is about convincing voters, especially non-conservatives, that they can't trust the media. Expect the Clinton campaign to push further. They will get us to ask: When will Rush Limbaugh call 16-year-old Bridget McCain a dog? When will someone on MSNBC call Bridget McCain a whore who is being pimped by her parents? Because the media obviously have a double standard, can you trust reporters when they portray McCain as being unfailingly honest and forever frank?

MSNBC's (and Chris Matthews's) crotch and Mountie fixation

Over at Hullabaloo, Digby makes the important observation that the Donner Party over at MSNBC is circling the wagons. They think the, uh, hullabaloo about David Shuster's "pimped out" comment is politically motivated -- just a way for the Clinton campaign to get positive, feel-good, noncontroversial mileage out of a stupid comment, I guess.

The towel-snapping boys in the MSNBC locker room, so eager to deny and deflect attention from their homoeroticism, have convinced themselves that they are the victims of That Harridan Hillary. How do we change their behavior? Simple. The Clinton campaign can throw the MSNBC crew's words right back at them.

The obvious place to start is to ask Chris Matthews why he was staring at the president's crotch as Bush minced across the deck of an aircraft carrier. But I'd like the Clinton campaign to ask Matthews, and press him repeatedly with follow-up questions, about this quote from Matthews: "He has the perfect chin, the perfect hair, he looks right. He looks like a Mountie. He looks like from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ... Can that guy capture the hearts of the American people?"

What's with Matthews's fixation on men's crotches and perfect chins and guys dressed like Mounties?

Do tell, Chris.

There's this comment in the comments section: "I think the inference is why is she making those calls? It does seem perverse when you consider she is not a politician or a political operative. There seems to me to be a feeling that if they put her up to the calls, the superdelegates will be put on the spot in a way that they wouldn't when speaking to a political operative."

I don't recall the press making an issue out of another instance of a presidential offspring delving deeply into the political process. During the presidential term of the first George Bush, his son George W. took up an office in the White House and became, in essence, his father's enforcer. I never knew about this little bit of history until 2000. What W. was doing in his father's White House was more substantial than anything Chelsea Clinton has done. But he got a pass from the press and she isn't getting one. Why the double standard?

A long campaign will benefit Democrats

"It's hard to see where this doesn't go all the way to the convention," quoth Josh Marshall, writing of the competition between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He's right. And it's the best thing that could happen to the Democratic Party.

The Democratic nominee will come out of the convention with an elated, motivated core of volunteers who have recent experience in canvassing door-to-door, making phone calls, stamping envelopes, and all of that drudgery that goes with working on a campaign. Having succeeded in putting their nominee over the top, there will be an army of volunteers, eager to topple the Republicans.

On the other side, a dormant McCain campaign will have to rouse itself from a six-month slumber when the general election campaign hits the stretch run from Labor Day to Election Day. In the general election, McCain volunteers will be inexperienced and rare in states that had late primaries. And the right-wing evangelicals will cross their arms and sit this one out.