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CBS' decision to rely on interviews rather than reporting failed to pay off in its Democratic coverage as anchor Katie Couric lobbed pedestrian horse-race style questions at the candidates. She asked both to comment on opinion poll standings, which allowed Obama to play the conventional expectations game--"I have no doubt that Senator Clinton is the favorite going into Super Tuesday"--and Rodham Clinton to play the faux-naive: "I do not pay a lot of attention to these. They go up. They go down. I think we have learned our lessons with New Hampshire…The only polling that counts is what voters actually decide themselves."
The questioning of Obama by NBC anchor Brian Williams used a different tack, with no more enlightening results. Williams offered a pair of talking points from the Rodham Clinton campaign, allowing Obama to dispatch them cleanly with well-practiced soundbites. On his failure to target Latinos directly as a voting bloc: "I think this myth that somehow Latinos are different from other folks and will not vote for an African-American candidate, I think that is the kind of, you know, old, race-based, politics that our campaign has rejected." On his potential inexperience when facing negative campaigning from Republicans this fall: "I promise you, if we get through this nomination, then we certainly will be battle tested, because I do not think my opponent in the Democratic primary has been going out of their way to take it easy on me."
Note how subtly "my opponent" becomes more than one person. It was not "her" way but "their" way she was not going out of.
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