McCain lost, but the McMedia treats him like a winner

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Remember how the media treated Democrats who ran for president and lost? The beltway bloviators and the villagers in the media reduced them to cartoon characters to be ridiculed and mocked with derisive laughter. Al Gore, who actually won the popular vote in 2000, and John Kerry, who narrowly lost by losing Ohio, have become the modern standards for openly hostile and derisive treatment from the petulant villagers in the media.

So how has the media treated John McCain since he got his ass handed to him by the largest margin of victory in quite some time? I mean, McCain presents such a wealth of comedic material. He is so easy to ridicule and mock, I do it all the time.

The media has always had a love affair with John McCain because he always gave them access and a ready quote (until he became the GOP nominee, that is). This is why the media that follows John McCain, in particular the local political reporters here in Arizona, are known as the McMedia. These reporters are at pains to ever report anything critical about McCain. I half expected to see blaring headlines in the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star the day after election declaring John McCain won the election – don't believe your lying eyes! – because these newspapers are so in the bag for McCain.

Apparently this love affair will continue now that McCain is a defeated (badly) presidential candidate. He is somehow entitled to kid glove treatment from his adoring McMedia. Jamison Foser reports at Media Matters – McCain lost — but the media treat him like a winner

If Kerry, who lost the presidency by one state, and Gore, who lost by a Supreme Court vote, were expected to "shut up for a spell," as Dionne put it, surely we might expect the media to ask the same of John McCain following his blowout loss to Barack Obama. But the media have always had a different set of rules for John McCain, and their reaction to his loss is no different. For the first time in memory, the media have granted the loser of a presidential election the ability to dictate coverage of the president who defeated him.

During the recent congressional debate over omnibus spending legislation, McCain's attacks — via Twitter and a speech on the Senate floor — on the bill's earmarks drove media coverage for days. MSNBC played clips of McCain's speech over and over, and the cable channel's hosts adopted McCain's anti-earmark position as their own. Maureen Dowd anthologized McCain's Twitter posts on The New York Times' op-ed pages.

Along with its focus on a trivially small portion of the legislation and its casual indifference to the actual merits of the programs in question, McCain's floor speech was most notable for how hostile it was — McCain was yelling and sputtering and waving his arms around furiously. Coming from, say, Al Gore, it would have been portrayed as an angry rant from a bitter loser. How can I be so sure? Because that's how the media typically portrayed Gore's post-2000 speeches, even when they were subdued, as Bob Somerby has detailed.

But McCain's tantrum wasn't received that way. Instead, the media treated McCain as though his loss last November endowed him with even greater moral authority and quickly took up his crusade as their own. If they noted his anger, they portrayed it as righteous anger. They didn't dismiss him because of it, as they had done with Gore; instead, they saw it as yet another reason to join his cause.

Never mind that McCain had devoted much of his failed presidential campaign to the same kind of disingenuous mockery of small-bore government spending — attacking bear research and funding for an "overhead projector," for example. And never mind that the public reacted much the way you would react to a contractor who shows up to rebuild your fire-ravaged home and says the first thing you need to do is get some new curtains. Voters may not have taken much interest in McCain's obsessive focus on what doesn't matter at the expense of what does — but reporters love it.

Then there's the February "fiscal responsibility summit" at the White House, at which Obama graciously asked McCain if he had anything to say, and McCain returned the kindness by suggesting Obama was squandering taxpayer funds on an unnecessary presidential helicopter. You don't have to have a particularly active imagination to suspect that such an act by John Kerry or Al Gore would have been greeted by weeks — if not years — of derisive media commentary. Had either of the vanquished Democrats pulled a stunt like that, they'd have been portrayed as petulant brats who were upset that they wouldn't be getting the helicopter.

But John McCain isn't portrayed as a sore loser or an angry and bitter crank. His complaints aren't dismissed as sour grapes, and he isn't mocked as someone who doesn't know when to get off the stage. Instead, the media take his petty obsessions seriously and treat him as a wise elder statesman. As David Dayen has noted, less than three months into 2009, McCain had already been hosted by Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday (twice), and CNN's State of the Union — and conducted a "Twitterview" with ABC's George Stephanopoulos. And if recent remarks by Meet the Press' David Gregory are any indication, McCain won't be getting any less airtime in the coming months.

They do know he lost, don't they?

Well, not to fear dear readers. Here at Blog for Arizona we will tell you the truth -that John McCain is a sore loser and an angry and bitter crank. And he should get off the stage and just shut the hell up! Better yet, he should retire and make way for new leadership in Arizona. He has caused enough damage to this state.