Palin displays a pro-bridge T shirt during her 2006 gubernatorial run
As I've written before, the new, Internet-driven 1,440-minute news cycle does a lot of damage to our political process, forcing the media to make ever-bigger mountains out of ever-smaller molehills in order to feed its insatiable online appetite. That said, there's at least one good thing about a campaign that moves at the speed of the Web: no one can hide.
Case in point: earlier today, the McCain campaign released an ad called "Original Mavericks." Designed to advance the GOP ticket's campaign to rebrand itself as a force for change by casting both candidates as the sort of Republicans who "battl[e] Republicans"--never mind last week's shindig in St. Paul--the spot made one claim in particular that seemed to provoke a lot of agita on the left: that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere." Within seconds, the liberals bloggers at Talking Points Memo Election Central had pointed out that "the ad continues to perpetuate the falsehood that Palin was responsible for stopping the Bridge to Nowhere." Soon, The Washington Post was calling the claim a "whopper" and The New Republic was characterizing it as "a naked lie." Between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., reporters received five--count 'em, five--e-mails from the Obama camp forwarding factchecks by independent organizations. They were clearly hoping that my blogging colleagues and I would jump on the "pants on fire" bandwagon.
For the record, it's hard to resist. While it's technically true that Palin abandoned plans to build a $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, it's completely misleading to portray Palin as a "crusader for the thrifty use of tax dollars" and claim, as the Alaska governor did in her convention speech last week, that she "told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere." Ultimately, Palin's decision to pull the plug on the project had nothing to do with principle. In fact, she supported the remote project--with some reservations--while running for governor in 2006, telling her potential constituents that she would "not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative." It was only when people like John McCain succeeding in convincing Congress that the project was a waste of money--and Congress subsequently killed its funding--that Palin decided to quit. As Palin said last year when ordering state transportation officials to ditch the bridge, "it's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island." In other words, McCain's new running mate nixed the project--which, again, she originally supported--because the politics were untenable and not because she was against earmarks (she subsequently spent the money on other transportation projects). "Both Presidential candidates have both confirmed that they will work towards earmark reforms," she said in July. "So, just recognizing that, seeing the writing on the wall, and dealing with it is where I am."
That said, the most interesting thing about today's give-and-take is not that Palin and McCain are misleading the public. In politics, that happens all the time. It's that the Internet--and, through the Internet, the Obama campaign--is forcing major media outlets to repeatedly reject the Bridge to Nowhere deception. In the past, Time and NEWSWEEK and the Times and the Post would've run a thorough factcheck the first time the falsehood surfaced. But then they would've ignored subsequent repetitions. We've already covered that, they'd say. It's old news. Meanwhile, the McCain camp would keep airing the same ads in swing states across the country--reaching millions of credulous voters who'd never read the original fact-checks. But now sites like TPM are (in their own words) forcing "the same news orgs that debunked the original Bridge to Nowhere falsehood" to "aggressively stay on McCain and hold him accountable every time he and his campaign repeat it." That's a certain kind of progress.
Going forward, I'm interested to see how Palin herself responds to the inevitable Bridge to Nowhere questions--and given the level of online outrage and MSM interest, Bridge to Nowhere questions are indeed inevitable (assuming, that is, that she ever takes questions to begin with). To that end, I'm reminded of something close McCain confidant Sen. Lindsey Graham told me and my fellow NEWSWEEKers last week when we asked whether Palin's record contradicts her reformist shtick. "It's just a journey that we've all taken," he said. "Think of John before the Keating Five scandal and after the Keating Five scandal. It's a journey that the whole country is beginning to take--that this kind of business, that this game that everybody played, at the end of the day is doing more harm than good. I think that what this shows is that she's taken this journey just like John. She's gone from, 'I'm a mayor who's supposed to bring home the bacon' to 'Enough already. Enough.' It's a journey that I've taken, too. I've taken earmarks. But I'm willing to pull the trigger now and say, 'Stop.' Because it's just killing everything."
That's a compelling story. But here's hoping that if and when Palin uses it in her own defense, some reporter--or blogger--reminds his or her readers that going from a candidate who supports a pork-barrel project because it will help you win votes to a governor who buries it because of political opposition to a vice presidential pick who says that she opposed it all along to conveniently reinforce her new boss's reformist brand isn't really much of a journey. It's just politics.
UPDATE, 6:46 p.m.: The Obama camp release a response ad calling both Palin and McCain's maverick credentials into question and accusing them of "lying about their records" in an effort to tie them to the "politics as usual" Washington crowd. Expect more of this from Chicago.
*Added 8:38 p.m.
