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The Obama Nation
Back When the Mainstream Media Loved Sarah Palin
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There have been countless attack stories from the mainstream media about Governor Sarah Palin since she became Senator John McCain’s running mate.
So, it’s hard to believe that they were once enchanted by Palin. But if you flash back to October 2007, Newsweek published a glowing profile on her.
In Alaska, Palin is challenging the dominant, sometimes corrupting, role of oil companies in the state’s political culture. “The public has put a lot of faith in us,” says Palin during a meeting with lawmakers in her downtown Anchorage office, where—as if to drive the point home—the giant letters on the side of the ConocoPhillips skyscraper fill an entire wall of windows. “They’re saying, ‘Here’s your shot, clean it up’.” For Palin, that has meant tackling the cozy relationship between the state’s political elite and the energy industry that provides 85 percent of Alaska’s tax revenues—and distancing herself from fellow Republicans, including the state’s senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, whose home was recently searched by FBI agents looking for evidence in an ongoing corruption investigation. (Stevens has denied any wrongdoing.) But even as she tackles Big Oil’s power, Palin has transformed her own family’s connections to the industry into a political advantage. Her husband, Todd, is a longtime employee of BP, but, as Palin points out, the “First Dude” is a blue-collar “sloper,” a fieldworker on the North Slope, a cherished occupation in the state. “He’s not in London making the decisions whether to build a gas line.”
In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Palin said it’s time for Alaska to “grow up” and end its reliance on pork-barrel spending. Shortly after taking office, Palin canceled funding for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” a $330 million project that Stevens helped champion in Congress. The bridge, which would have linked the town of Ketchikan to an island airport, had come to symbolize Alaska’s dependence on federal handouts. Rather than relying on such largesse, says Palin, she wants to prove Alaska can pay its own way, developing its huge energy wealth in ways that are “politically and environmentally clean.”
What a difference an election season makes. If only Governor Palin stayed out of the way of the mainstream media’s cherished Barack Obama.
Obama Campaign Smears Sarah Palin
There has been a steady stream of smears on Sarah Palin since she was announced as the running mate of John McCain.
Many of these ugly fabrications have come from extreme left bloggers, but at least one came straight from Team Obama, according to the McCain campaign.
The first attack came from Obama surrogate Rep. Robert Wexler, the co-chair of Obama’s campaign in Florida. Wexler, badly mangling his facts, accused Governor Palin of supporting Pat Buchanan in the 2000 Alaska primary.
Based on this he asserted that Governor Palin had “aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics,” while finding space to invoke the name of Adolph Hitler and the phrase “Nazi sympathizer.”
Only it wasn’t true–Palin was an official on the Forbes campaign in 2000. Wexler never apologized or retracted his statement.
Then an official Obama spokesman picked up the charge in a statement to the Miami Herald:
“Palin was a supporter of [MSNBC analyst] Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,” Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski wrote in an email.
Governor Palin has never supported Pat Buchanan and every responsible magazine or blog that made the charge has since corrected the record, leaving only the Obama campaign peddling this smear.
How is it that the media, so committed to fighting the smears against the Obama campaign, is more than happy to allow this one to fester?
Clearly, the Obama campaign is running scared, since they feel a need to invent a story like this to scare people away from Sarah Palin.
But I guess we can’t count on the “mainstream media” to cover the ugliness of the Obama campaign.
Who is John McCain?
It’s widely known that John McCain has long been a bi-partisan leader in the Senate, but details of his earlier life aren’t often shared by the mainstream media.
Check out this video profile of the experiences that made John McCain who he is.
