Ground Game

John McCain has certainly been the most-popular Republican with the media over the past decade. He's been supplanted in recent years by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg (before he left the party). But in a race against Barack Obama, McCain will face the unusual prospect of being the non-media candidate. One advantage of McCain's extended "resting period" before facing a Democratic opponent is that he's had plenty of time to brace for this likely pivot in coverage.

As an early example of how they will respond to what they perceive as unfavorable media coverage, McCain adviser Mark Salter goes over Newsweek for this story on Obama that Salter say unfairly portrays McCain's criticism of Obama as unjustified attacks while not applying a similar standard to Obama's missives. Of course, it's unclear what kind of response Salter's response would get if it was simply sent out to campaign reporters as a press release. Instead, the response was forwardly directly via email to McCain supporters through a campaign surrogate. That serves two purposes: it gets the message to the online grassroots and shows those base conservatives, many who have displayed skepticism about McCain, that he is fighting the same "battles" against the media that many in the Republican Party have for fought for decades. From the email:

Without a trace of skepticism, your reporters embraced the primary communications strategy the Obama campaign intends to follow: any criticism of their candidate is a below the belt, Republican attack machine distortion that should discredit the authors. And any attempt by our campaign to counter that suggestion will be dismissed as a rant. The other day, Senator Obama noted that Representative DeFazio’s accusation that Senator McCain was up to his neck in the Keating 5 scandal was a legitimate line of attack, despite the fact the Senator was largely exonerated by the Senate Ethics Committee, whose special counsel declared he had been kept in the investigation only because of his party affiliation. Were we to raise the Rezko matter, their campaign would accuse us of distracting voters with a low blow by making more of a “flimsy relationship” than the facts warranted. Evan and Richard, I feel certain, would agree.