MSGOP

Man, what was up with MSNBC's post-debate coverage? I caught it being replayed last night at midnight, and it really felt fishy. Everyone else on TV, Fox included, seemed to think the debate was a draw. Yet Chris Matthews and his panel (Mitchell, Meacham, Scarborough, and an unusually quiet and aquiescent Ron Reagan) were falling over themselves to go fuck themselves Cheney.

Here's my theory:

Some of them folksy homespun lines Matthews and company used seemed just a wee bit too prepared. "Dick Cheney was loaded for bear tonight. He went looking for squirrel and he found squirrel". "It was like a squirt pistol against an M-16 machine gun". They were dead-set on taking any debate that wasn't a clear case of Edwards taking Cheney to the woodshed, and spinning it as a victory for Cheney.

But why? Conservative bias? Maybe, maybe not. But I think there's the bigger issue for MSNBC, which aspires to rise to the ranks of CNN and Fox. They wanted to make a splash, and to grab the leading edge of the campaign's meta-narrative and try to set the tone. The way you do that is to emphasize the drama of the race. Kerry clearly whupped Bush in the first debate, and the pendulum swings one way. So why not call the VP debate in Cheney's favor, "big time", so that the pendulum swings back the other way, thus heightening the drama, and promoting the idea that "the pressure is on Kerry" in the 2nd Presidential debate.

(BTW if Maria Shriver did a story for Dateline on immigration issues in California, I wouldn't trust her. I don't trust Andrea Mitchell as an objective reporter. I would feel the same way if genders were reversed.)

You know what the big secret about the VP debate is anyway?

When Friday's debate comes along, it will be nothing but a distant memory.

Elections are not won, or even swung positively, in the VP debate. The only thing that can happen in a VP debate that matters is if one candidate fucks up royal, and I don't think either candidate did that, unless of course you count Cheney saying he never met Edwards before.


(that's cheney on the far left)



And even when a candidate bites it in the VP debate (Quayle 88), it doesn't tend to matter much. Edwards was not "obliterated" as Joe Scarborough put it. So life goes on, and the debate on Friday will be very interesting, as Bush doesn't really have a domestic record worth talking about.

UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has more on MSNBC.

2ND UPDATE: Another partial explanation.