Sunday, September 28, 2008

Palin Will Spend More Time With Couric, Cont'd   [Byron York]

Team McCain tells me the strategy of having Palin talk to traditional broadcast networks ABC and CBS was designed to allow Palin to reach the maximum number of viewers.  "Coming off her tremendous performance at the convention, our goal was to allow as many Americans as possible an opportunity to see her answer questions about her record, her biography and her principles and convictions on as large a stage as possible," one campaign source told me this afternoon.  The new CBS interviews, to be done tomorrow, are intended to keep Palin in the public eye as she prepares for Thursday's debate.

It is true that the broadcast network newscasts still have the biggest audiences in news day-to-day (although they have been eclipsed by Fox and CNN in convention and special-event coverage).  But that doesn't address the question as far as Palin is concerned: What are all those viewers seeing?  Certainly, a significant number of Republicans were discouraged by Palin's performance in the Couric interviews that have already aired.

Some Republicans believe the McCain campaign made a fundamental mistake in the Palin rollout by focusing on those traditional broadcast networks.  (The only other interview Palin has done was with Sean Hannity on Fox News.)  Palin is the person who almost single-handedly repaired John McCain's relations with the conservative base, and a base media strategy might have been a more effective one.  If, a week or so after the Republican convention, Palin had done a lot of talk radio — Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Bennett, Hewitt, etc. — she would have had widespread exposure to the voters most favorably disposed to her.  Of course the campaign press corps would have complained, but they would also probably have been forced to use snippets from Palin's talk-radio interviews, which means that what Palin said in a friendly atmosphere would ultimately make its way to an even wider audience, one that includes independents and undecided voters.  After that radio immersion period — starting, say, about now — Palin would do interviews with everyone.

P.S. One more thought. I know I stressed talk radio above, but it would probably have been wiser for the McCain team to have fashioned a rollout combining talk radio, the blogosphere, and local news outlets in key states.  Debuting Palin on a network newscast seems like, well, an old-fashioned kind of strategy.  It certainly wasn't a fresh approach.

Now, none of that would matter if Palin just couldn't perform, but some fairly well-informed people in this believe that, even given her lack of experience in some national issues, she is still performing far below her abilities in these big network interviews, and they're trying to figure out why that is.  So they think a better strategy might have helped.  Perhaps.  But the McCain team chose the path it chose, and now they have put an enormous amount of pressure on Palin as Thursday's debate approaches.
 

09/28 04:52 PMShare