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While ABC anchor Charles Gibson was interviewing John McCain, CBS and NBC turned to the disquieting mood at his campaign rallies. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell heard an audience in Wisconsin "repeatedly vent frustration" over McCain's poor performance in the polls. The "vocally pro-McCain crowd" urged his ticket "to get even tougher" against Barack Obama. CBS' Chip Reid called the crowd "raucous" and "in a state of disbelief that Obama could actually win." Both reporters heard the GOP ticket make insinuations against Obama. Reid quoted running mate Sarah Palin question whether "we are receiving straight answers from our opponent." O'Donnell interpreted McCain's soundbite as imputing Obama's honesty: "We need to trust the next President of the United States and take his word."
CBS' Jeff Greenfield isolated a pair of flaws in McCain's campaign message to account for his struggles. He argued that states such as North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana usually trend Republican "mostly out of cultural values issues, whether it is social conservatism, national security, patriotism" but not this year. "The economy seems to have driven all of them into the background." Greenfield also detected a contradiction within McCain over how to respond to the financial crisis. McCain is a mixture of "free market Ronald Reagan conservative" and Teddy Roosevelt Republican who "believes in government action." His call for Treasury Department intervention into the home mortgage market has angered conservatives and laid bare that contradiction.
Covering Obama from the campaign trail, NBC's Lee Cowan (at the tail of the O'Donnell videostream) cited the Democrat's fundraising advantage as the reason for his lead. According to an analysis of campaign advertising on television by the University of Wisconsin, McCain and Obama spend comparable amounts on negative attack advertising against one another. That represents "nearly all" of McCain's effort whereas Obama is outspending McCain by so much that the negative spots account for only one third of the Democratic effort. How much money does Obama have? In the week before Election Day, Cowan told us, he has purchased primetime from the broadcast networks to air 30-minute campaign infomercials.
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