McCain's March Blunder

McCain's campaign is an embarrassment, although I have to admit -- they lie and slur with the best of them. But tactically and strategically, they are really pathetic.

Currently, McCain and the right wing are furious that Obama is getting much more coverage for his overseas trip than McCain got back in March. I'd remind them that Obama is a more captivating characters for readers and viewers, and he's not competing for airtime with a contested primary back home. McCain, on the other hand, is a tired old coot who had to fight for attention against the historic Obama-Clinton primary.

Still, there has to be more to it, right? Anyone with a brain knows that the media tilts conservative. So why didn't McCain get more coverage? Well, it turns out, it's because of missteps and bad decision-making by McCain's campaign:

But there's a big difference between McCain's trip and the one Obama will embark on next week to Europe and the Middle East. In what could be interpreted now as a possible strategic misstep, the McCain campaign chose not to take reporters along for the ride, forcing media outlets who wanted to cover the newly elected GOP nominee to travel on their own without any guarantee of getting anywhere near the senator. The small group of scribes who made the trek (Newsweek chose not to) faced a logistical nightmare, from arranging last-minute foreign visas to struggling to keep up with McCain as they flew commercially from stop to stop. (McCain traveled by a military aircraft.) In contrast, the Obama campaign is inviting reporters on its tour, handling all the logistics--including transportation--for what will certainly be a much larger press corps than usual.

Why didn't McCain take reporters on his first overseas visit since clinching the nomination? For one, McCain was on official Senate travel, and aides rightly worried about an onslaught of stories questioning whether he was improperly using his Senate office to benefit his presidential campaign. It was also a campaign in transition, and they worried they didn't have the manpower logistically to handle a large press corps on an overseas swing. The Arizona senator did do several media interviews while abroad, including a pre-arranged sit-down with CNN's John King in Saddam Hussein's old palace in Baghdad. And some of the campaign beat regulars were on hand when McCain made a big time gaffe, confusing Sunnis and Shiites. It made headlines back home, but as First Read notes, it didn't create nearly the stir it would have had Brian Williams, Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson been reported their evening newscast from the scene.

Honestly, McCain should be glad that no one paid attention to him. After all, would McCain really have wanted this to get more play than it did:



Such a gaffe would kill Obama's chances to be president. But for multiple reasons, including the general lack of interest in anything McCain has to say, it only became fodder for bloggers and late night comedians.