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Ron Allen led off NBC's newscast by handicapping the Democratic Presidential primary in Indiana. Citing opinion polls he called "the Hoosier State a jump ball" yet one that Hillary Rodham Clinton must win, according to her operatives. Just as Jeff Greenfield had done for CBS on Wednesday, Allen diagramed the state's demographics as "predominately white, with income and education levels similar to Pennsylvania and Ohio," which favors Rodham Clinton. Yet Indianapolis and Gary have "large black communities" and the state's "northwestern corner, bordering Illinois, watches Chicago TV," which favors Barack Obama.
When Obama started boasting of a childhood diet of "pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds," CBS' Jim Axelrod played interpreter. He deciphered Obama's strategy as reminding blue collar workers that "he was raised like them." On ABC, Jake Tapper narrowed that blue collar demographic somewhat, emphasizing just those members of the white working class who are alienated by Obama's "cool cerebral style." Tapper quoted from Pennsylvania exit polls that found that a small proportion of Rodham Clinton's white support may opt for John McCain over Obama in November. Some told pollsters that "race was an important factor" in their selection on primary day.
Tapper then repeated, without comment, a quote from Obama's campaign manager in National Journal: "The vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain's camp already." Is it proper, journalistically, for Tapper to let that quote hang there unexamined? In effect, the Obama campaign was asserting that white racists are a component of McCain's electoral coalition. Tapper should have offered McCain a comment in reply. Is his big tent really big enough to include white racists? Or does McCain prefer to disavow racist support? Or does he refute Obama's analysis, insisting that white racists are not firmly in the GOP camp but are up for grabs?
The need for Tapper to ask such follow-up questions was especially pressing because of the news McCain himself was making this week. Thursday NBC's Kelly O'Donnell filed from the candidate's tour of poverty-stricken regions in Appalachia and the Deep South. Now Tapper's colleague Ron Claiborne (embargoed link) covers McCain's Time for Action Tour. Claiborne followed him to places "where Republicans running for President are seldom seen" including Alabama's poor rural Black Belt where McCain called Selma's civil rights marchers "patriots, the best kind of patriots."
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