According to a news release from CBS News, Harry Smith will have an exclusive interview this morning with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, on “The Early Show.”
It’s not really exclusive, of course. CNN’s Drew Griffin interviewed the proud father of the Republican Party’s first female vice presidential candidate way back on Sept. 8.
But, hey, this is TV and the CBS interview is exclusive for this morning.
Was John McCain manager Steve Schmidt’s puzzingly strong attack on the New York Times last week really a trap, an intentional bid to call even more attention to negative coverage of Palin to lower expectations?
Harry Smith flew all the way up to Alaska last week and drove out to Wasilla with his crew to learn that Chuck Heath, who looks like the high school track coach he was when his daughter ran to a cross-country championship for him, thinks:
“She is ready to do anything she wants to. She perseveres. She works so hard. She learns so fast.”
Harry: “There’s a sense that she hasn’t been treated fairly by the media.”
Chuck Heath: “That’s what I feel. Someone said, ‘Well they have to get to know Sarah Palin.’ But Sarah Palin — there is a good side of Sarah Palin and they’re digging and digging for the bad side and there is no real bad side. They’re fabricating a lot of things that I don’t want to go into.”
That much news is certainly worth getting up early for. But here’s a really silly idea for this gotcha society:
If a candidate’s family is not being arrested or not out on the campaign trail inviting news coverage as McCain’s 96-year-old mother, Roberta, does, why don’t we just leave them alone?
The way the U.S. media has so conscientiously managed to deny itself virtually any inquisitions of Barack Obama’s poor half-brother in Africa and his half-sister in Hawaii and Joe Biden’s mother and Michelle’s family.
And by keeping the governor herself largely away from the media, the McCain campaign is, in effect, playing a prevent defense, ceding the public relations playing field to others to describe, define and caricature Palin strangely unanswered by her for a week now.
One recent Alaska poll showed Palin’s approval rating there had tumbled to 68%, which is still about 20 points higher than either presidential candidate and seven times larger than Congress’ approval.
The upcoming downside for the Obama-Biden campaign is that its supporters became so flustered over Palin’s surprisingly explosive popularity coming out of the GOP convention. They have so successfully mocked, derided and lowered expectations for Palin in Thursday night’s VP debate that if she doesn’t drool or speak in tongues, many millions still open to persuasion will be impressed.
Al Gore’s campaign made the exact same mistake going into the 2000 debates. So all Texas Gov. George W. Bush had to do was not lose.
In that sense Democrats may have played right into a PR cul-de-sac. Biden, for instance, described Palin as merely better-looking than him. A far better communications strategy would have been to insincerely portray Palin with superlatives as a superwoman, make it harder, not easy, for her to impress. Too late now
LA Times Blog
9/29/8
