Word: mccain
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...past week, the campaign has written off much of the skepticism about the qualifications of vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin as the reaction of a biased media establishment out of touch with real Americans. "She's not part of the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit," Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's senior advisers, told TIME. "Elite opinion looks down with contempt at people who are not part of their world." Left unmentioned was the fact that McCain himself has been an A-list member of the Washington élite since he arrived in the capital more than 30 years...
...Part of the new approach is clearly tactical. Picking fights with the national press typically riles the Republican base. One of the McCain campaign's largest single fund-raising days came in February, the day after the New York Times raised questions about McCain's relationship with a lobbyist, a story the campaign condemned as an attack by the liberal media. Since then, the campaign has fired off public letters charging bias at news organizations as varied as Newsweek and MSNBC. During the GOP convention, the campaign canceled McCain's appearance on Larry King Live in retaliation for the supposedly...
...approach also reflects what aides describe as McCain's increasing personal frustration with the press. He is aggravated, aides say, by what he calls the mainstream media's favoritism of Barack Obama - proven, he contends, by the volume and tone of coverage that the Democratic nominee receives. McCain also feels that his inquisitors are consumed with the pursuit of frivolous "gotcha" questions. In two of his last open sessions with reporters this summer, McCain fumbled on answers about federal subsidies for Viagra and contraception, and whether he approved one of his campaign messages. Neither question sought answers to significant issues...
...Although McCain was one of the last holdouts in his campaign for continuing the signature "Straight Talk" sessions, he now embraces a tightly supervised separation from the media pack. He has not held a press conference since early August, and reporters traveling with him can go days without seeing the candidate up close, and weeks without an opportunity to exchange a word with him. In a recent pre-convention interview with TIME, McCain dismissed many of the questions - including ones that seemed benign to the reporters posing them - as gotcha attacks, and refused to answer others. He was similarly brusque...
...same time, the McCain campaign has struggled to reclaim the national political narrative from Obama. A review of 17,455 print stories between July 7 and Aug. 17 by the news-clip warehouse LexisNexis found that Obama received 38% more coverage than McCain. The tone of the coverage, the analysts concluded, was "remarkably similar," with about 31% of the Obama coverage categorized as "negative" compared with 33% of the McCain coverage. Magazines have also shown a preference for covering Obama, with the younger candidate scoring covers of Rolling Stone, GQ, People, Vanity Fair and Men's Vogue. So far this...