Read More of the Same Day's Blog

As he had repeatedly promised, President George Bush exercised his veto against a $35bn five-year extension of the federal subsidy for state-run children's healthcare, dubbed S-CHIP. He attracted just enough attention to qualify as Story of the Day. But the no-surprise veto was accompanied by offers of compromise so only ABC treated it as lead material--and NBC did not even bother to assign a reporter. CBS chose to lead for a second day with the Blackwater USA paramilitary operation in Iraq. And all three networks turned their attention to Campaign 2008, with both ABC and NBC publishing their own poll numbers, NBC as its newscast's lead.

The two polls measured the strengths of the GOP Presidential candidates in nationwide polls of Republicans--and came up with the same answers, within their margin of error: both had Rudolph Giuliani in the lead (ABC 34%, NBC 30%), followed by Fred Thompson (ABC 17%, NBC 23%), John McCain (ABC 12%, NBC 15%) and Mitt Romney (ABC 11%, NBC 10%). NBC's Tim Russert went inside the numbers to rank the issues of greatest importance to Republican voters: in declining order of importance they were Defense (including terrorism), then Domestic (such as healthcare), then Morals (social issues) with Economics (read taxes) bringing up the rear. ABC poll also found that Hillary Rodham Clinton would beat Giuliani (51% vs 43%) in a hypothetical General Election. "Get this, Charlie," George Stephanopoulos (no link) alerted his anchor Charles Gibson: Rodham Clinton's popular husband Bill is "as much of a plus" for her as Giuliani's experience on September 11th, 2001, is for the former mayor.

ABC and NBC both followed up with features on Republican contenders. NBC chose Fred Thompson, as anchor Brian Williams pointed out, an actor on his network's Law & Order in primetime. Kelly O'Donnell observed that Thompson is not quite ready for primetime in his late-starting campaign, citing "a handful of slipups that rival campaigns are happy to point out." Thompson, she pointed out, "is courting evangelical and social conservatives but says he is not a regular churchgoer himself."

For the first time on any network nightly newscast, Republican Ron Paul was the topic of a personal profile. The reason, ABC's Jake Tapper explained, was that Paul "unlike almost every other Republican" is increasing his fundraising quarter-over-quarter. Yesterday, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd predicted that Paul's haul for the last three months would be $3m. It turned out to be $5m. ABC's in-house conservative columnist George Will credited Paul's anti-war message: "Just come home. We just marched in. We can just come home." Representative Paul is also an obstetrician. On Capitol Hill, he votes against so many spending bills that his nickname, Tapper told us, is Dr No.

CBS chose to feature the Democratic field. Anchor Katie Couric sat down with Drew Westen, one of their consultants and author of The Political Brain. Westen's winning recipe is that Democrats should be "warmer and less wonky," more worried about conveying honest human feelings than policy platforms. "Candidates should go for words that will send hearts soaring not heads spinning," was how Couric paraphrased Westen's message. "The bottom line is--authenticity counts."

As the saying goes: authenticity, if you can fake that, you can fake anything.

Andrew Tyndall 10/4/07 10:54:51 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report