Posted by
Alex on Monday, September 01, 2008 6:55:15 AM
And there's the rub: do we really believe that something as massive as a national presidential campaign fundamentally shifts more than once or twice per election? It's another byproduct of millisecond news cycles: if today's story isn't game-changing, we might as well change the channel. And we can't have that. So this week, as the media grade each GOP convention speaker (game changers all!), let's test-drive a new sports analogy: game over.
First of all, "game over" isn't a sports analogy (or metaphor for that matter), it's a video game analogy. Unless you say "Game over, man, game over," in which case it's a reference to the movie Aliens.
Furthermore how fundamental does something have to be to be "game-changing?" It's not as if game-changing events in actual, you know, games represent complete and utter paradigm shifts. When Brett Favre throws a momentum-swinging interception, it's not like they all of a sudden start playing hockey. To expect that "game-changing" events during a presidential campaign will yield actual, fundamental changes is kind of the same thing. All it means is that the status quo has changed, that yesterday's or the previous moment's expectations are obsolete. As much as Obama and his surrogates want to deny it, McCain's selection of Sarah Palin for VP seems to have done that: a glance at the most recent
CNN and
Zogby polls shows that Obama's post convention bounce is all but obliterated.
Do all of these putative "game-changers" end panning out? Of course not. Insofar as the media blusters a lot, Ms. Ball is on the ball (oh no, another sports analogy, and a bad pun to boot). But I'd like to point out that the Rev. Wright issue wasn't resolved with Obama's "exculpatory speech on race," or even after he disowned the pastor. Instead it was overshadowed, by Tony Rezko and by Bill Ayers, who weren't themselves game-changers but insteadn an established pattern.
At least the media isnt going "BOOM!" and "doink!" like John Madden while all this is going on.