Fox’s Shepard Smith: Obama’s media coverage was not reason for McCain loss (Video)

I think the people on the McCain side were so obsessed with being negative and literally trying to destroy Barack Obama – over getting out their message. What they done is to feed the media with one haphazard negative attack after another — was Obama a terrorist or a socialist, and naturally the media seized on these — Palin’s famous ‘palling around’ rendition – over what they had planned to do for the country.

The atmosphere at McCain and particularly Palin rallies became so negative – that if the McCain camp had a message it wasn’t getting out over reporters of mob-like crowds shouting ‘kill him’, ‘off with his head’, ‘traitor’ and ‘terrorist’. While the McCain camp got what it wanted – in it’s calculated decision to go extremely negative – there were reports of campaign staff going out with the message that Osama and Obama are the same in that they both have terrorist friends. Or the racist overtones of the leaflets – and the sick joke gone-to-far robo-call calls – what the McCain camp got is a marginal constituency of people to go along with this – under the over arching message that if you didn’t come on their side then you were not pro-American, and likely were not putting Country First – what the McCain camp didn’t get was the support of the majority – who saw this as going in the wrong direction.

The way the McCain campaign was run was similar to the way he conducted himself in the debates, where McCain was more interested in sniping, taking off the gloves and kicking some you know what…, Barack Obama wasn’t as interested in scoring points – in realizing that this was one of the biggest audiences he was going to get, and therefore there was no better time to get across his message as clear and succinctly as he could. This was crystallized particularly in the second debate. And the following press coverage and American public came away with the view of just how well Obama did get his message across, versus the McCain coverage which was more about what was he doing during the debate, all the face pulling, the arrogant posturing, and the ‘that one’ comment. What McCain should have realized is that those antics and the antics of his and Palin’s stoked-up mob-like rallies – was off message, it created a new focus away from his campaign message. McCain and Palin lost because they were not connecting with anything people wanted to hear.

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