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Obama on Olbermann was much worse than I'd originally thought.

Last night, with the help of TiVo, I watched Barack Obama as he simultaneously appeared on O'Reilly and Olbermann's shows. I thought he was terrific on O'Reilly, that he benefited from having the blowhard pushing back at him, and pretty useless on Olbermann, where, I thought, Olbermann was doing his, thing railing about McCain's "lies" and leaving Obama with nothing to do but figure out how enthusiastically to agree with him. I said:

Olbermann was insipid, feeding Obama overstated arguments, and leaving Obama struggling to seem appropriately well-modulated and ending up insipidly nodding and smiling. Olbermann showed a McCain/Palin ad -- this one -- and exploded about all the "lies" and insisted that Obama agree that these were lies. Ugh.... Obama seemed trapped.

Here's what I was looking at:

Now, I'm seeing this news story from yesterday, time-stamped before the Olbermann show:

Barack Obama ripped into John McCain and Sarah Palin as never before Monday, accusing his Republican White House foes of "shameless" dishonesty with their claim to be "mavericks" ready to shake up Washington.

McCain and Palin were "lying about their records," the Obama campaign said after the Republican running mates advertised themselves in a television spot as the "original mavericks" who would stand up for hard-pressed voters.

And here's that new Obama ad.

So it wasn't that Obama got stuck in the insipid world of Keith Olbermann. Olbermann was feeding Obama Obama's own campaign material.

Here's the O'Reilly interview, the one I think is much better. (Don't miss the low blow: "I don't care if I live in a hut." Obama acts like he doesn't hear it or doesn't get it.)

You know, yesterday, Josh Marshall lashed out at Sarah Palin for planning to do multiple interviews with ABC's Charlie Gibson. Marshall pronounced it "unwatchable" in advance. He said that Gibson had "gelded" himself by agreeing to the multiple interviews format.

With that in mind, I wanted to know if Marshall had something to say about the way Olbermann fed Obama his own message of the day. Over on Marshall's blog, here's the first thing I see:

We've now had a week of blaring headlines and one-liners about Sarah Palin as the mavericky, pork-busting reformer from Alaska. But we seem to be witnessing the first stirrings of a backlash and a dawning realization that the 'Sarah Palin' we've heard so much about over the last few days is a fraud of truly comical dimensions.

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it....

Think about that. On the stump, not a single word that comes out of her mouth -- or not a single word that the McCain folks put in her mouth -- is anything but a lie. I know that sounds like hyperbole. But just go down the list. None of them bear out.

So, let's see. You're saying it's a good thing when all these major media repeat the Obama campaign's message of the day? That's journalism as it should be, bearing out the truth. But when Charlie Gibson sets up multiple interviews, that's journalism gone to hell.

Josh, seriously. Aren't you just a teensy bit embarrassed?

Full post as published by Althouse on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).