"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser

Media's assessment of likability doesn't match voters'

Yet again, the political media is obsessed with the question of whether the Democratic presidential nominee is "likable" and whether he can "connect" with "regular people." We go through this every four years. It's a remarkably bad way for journalists to spend their -- and our -- time, but old habits die hard, especially when the alternative is doing some actual reporting.

Voting for president based on who seems the most likable -- or, in the media's favorite shorthand, based on who you would rather have a beer with -- is a spectacularly bad idea, what with the almost total lack of similarity between talking about the Knicks over a bottle of Bud and running the world's most powerful nation. It requires very little judgment or analytical skills to determine that the Knicks stink. Deciding whether to send Americans off to die in a foreign land is (or should be) a little different.

But that isn't the only reason why journalists shouldn't spend their airtime and column inches pontificating about which candidate is more likable. For better or worse, voters will allow their opinions of the candidates' personalities to have an effect on their vote -- and that isn't an entirely bad thing.

But voters don't need to be told who they like. They can decide that for themselves. They don't need to be told who "connects" with them or does not -- they will feel a connection, or they won't. The pundit class' insistence on talking endlessly about candidates' purported "likability" and ability to "relate" to "regular Americans" is, at best, a waste of time, and the ultimate in pointless horserace journalism. And at worst, it introduces an observer effect, where the view promoted by the media -- the purported observers and chroniclers -- that a candidate has a likability problem with the public becomes inseparable in the public's mind from the candidate's inherent "likability." Not to mention that, if the media talk enough about "likability," the public absorbs the idea that that is a key criterion in judging a candidate's qualifications. In other words, the public hears enough from the media that a candidate is not considered likable by the public, and the public itself begins to view the candidate as less likable.

And then there's the fact that the pundit crowd doesn't have the foggiest idea what they are talking about. They sit around their insular little echo chamber in Washington and New York, prattling on about people in Michigan and Pennsylvania being incapable of liking a candidate who doesn't bowl well or who drinks green tea. And, incredibly, they tell us the candidate is an elitist, even as they make elitist assumptions about the voters.

Needless to say, they're wrong. A lot. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot the clues that the pundit class obsession with Barack Obama's purported inability to connect with regular people is misplaced. He is, after all, consistently running ahead of John McCain in the polls. And he did just raise $52 million in one month, with an average contribution of $68. That's a hell of a lot of support from regular people for someone who is supposed to have trouble connecting with regular people.

If the fact that Barack Obama is winning is insufficient proof for the media that he can relate to "regular people" well enough to win, the media might want to take a few moments to browse the public polling results posted at PollingReport.com.

While the pundits sit around insisting that Barack Obama has trouble relating to people, people keep telling pollsters the opposite. Obama does better than McCain on questions about which candidate "understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives" and "understands the concerns of people like myself." In many cases, he does significantly better -- 25 points better in a USA Today/Gallup poll on the question of which candidate understands problems Americans face, 18 points better on a similar question in an ABC/Washington Post poll, and 22 points better on the question of which candidate "cares about the needs of people like you" in a USA Today/Gallup poll. A Time poll asked which candidate is the "most likable" -- Obama bettered McCain 58 percent to 23 percent. USA Today/Gallup found more people say Obama shares their values; ABC/Washington Post found more people say Obama "represents" their "own personal values." Based on those poll results, if either candidate is having trouble connecting with people, it is clearly John McCain.

So why does the media keep claiming that Obama, rather than McCain, has trouble connecting with people? Occam's Razor suggests a classic case of projection. They revere John McCain, so they assume everyone else does, too. They find Barack Obama aloof, so they assume everyone else does, too. And to support their assumptions, they desperately search for reasons why the American people, despite their continued insistence on expressing a preference for Obama, secretly dislike him.

If the media's insistence that Barack Obama has difficulty connecting with regular people isn't supported by the polling, upon what evidence do they stake their claims? The political media's method for declaring who you like is, like much of what they do, a scene from a middle school cafeteria, played out with deadly consequences. Instead of each voter deciding for himself who he likes and connects with, the punditocracy presumes to decide for all of us who is and isn't cool, and goes about trying to convince the rest of us that we don't like whoever has been deemed uncool. (And they just happen to keep deciding that Republicans are cool, and Democrats are not.)

Like a middle school cafeteria, the assessments tend to be based on superficialities. Al Gore was mocked for his clothes (brown pants! Three-button suits! The horror!); John Kerry for his physical appearance (he "looks French," so many pundits delighted in reminding us, dutifully repeating a talking point handed down by Republican operatives). And Barack Obama was the unfortunate kid who brought the "wrong" lunch to school, mocked by Chris Matthews and others for eating arugula and drinking orange juice.

Like cliquish teens, the D.C. pundit class is all too happy to make up a reason why you should dislike a candidate if a real reason fails to present itself. They told you again and again that Al Gore was a liar, lying about things he had said in order to do so. They attributed a bogus quote about NASCAR to John Kerry in order to portray him as a stiff. And Barack Obama ... they're desperate to find a reason why people don't like Obama (even though they do). The bowling thing didn't stick as well as they had hoped, and it's probably safe to assume that, Chris Matthews' best efforts notwithstanding, Barack Obama's orange juice consumption is unlikely to spark much of a backlash against his candidacy. So this week they took a new one out for a spin, arguing that Obama's undoing will be that he is uptight and cannot take a joke because his campaign criticized a magazine cover that depicted him as a terrorist.

Just two weeks ago, the very same Washington media elite was in an uproar, visibly offended that Wesley Clark had said that John McCain was a war hero, but that heroism didn't qualify him for the presidency. They were offended and outraged that Clark hadn't been quite enthusiastic enough in professing his admiration for McCain's heroism. And now, when a national magazine runs a cover depicting Barack Obama as a flag-burning disciple of Osama bin Laden, they tell him to lighten up. Get a sense of humor, buddy - the cover may have depicted you as a terrorist, but at least it didn't say you are a hero whose heroism nevertheless doesn't necessarily qualify you to be president. That would be an outrage!

But the problem isn't that Obama can't take a joke; it's that the Beltway media's idea of what's funny and what isn't would itself be funny if it weren't so damaging to our politics. This is a crowd that lives for recycled humor and endless sequels to marginally amusing original content -- a crowd that still thinks Jib Jab is cutting-edge humor. If there is ever a City Slickers 6, MSNBC will play clips of it three times an hour. And this is a crowd that laughed along as George Bush joked about his WMD lie that sent thousands of brave Americans to die, while sitting stone-faced as Stephen Colbert masterfully skewered them at the 2006 White House Correspondent's dinner. There is a lot of humor in the world -- but very little of it is found on cable news.

Besides, there's no reason to think the public is looking for a president who can also serve as Comedian in Chief. Before he started lying about the war records of Purple Heart recipients, Bob Dole was probably the funniest presidential nominee in the past 30 years. He lost in a landslide.

Then there's John McCain -- the media regularly tell us how funny he is. And it's true, he tells jokes all the time. Like the one he told last year, when he encountered a mannequin at a campaign event - which he described as a "dummy" and (wrongly) said was named "Hillary." If the humor value in calling Hillary Clinton a "dummy" escapes you, keep in mind that the speaker is a guy who keeps talking about Czechoslovakia in the present tense, despite the fact that that nation ceased to exist 15 years ago. A little funnier now, isn't it? At another event, McCain sang "Bomb Iran," (roughly) to the tune of "Barbara Ann."

McCain's most infamous joke was the one in which he called a then-teenage Chelsea Clinton "ugly" and said then-Attorney General Janet Reno was Chelsea's "father." Or the one he reportedly told during his 1986 Senate campaign, the premise of which was that women enjoy being savagely beaten and raped. (When the alleged joke was reported in 1986, a McCain spokeswoman said McCain "does not recall" making the joke.)

If only Barack Obama had a sense of humor like that fun John McCain, people might like him!

More likely, though, the media would invent some new reason to explain Obama's inability to connect with the voters -- an inability that seems to exist only in the mind of the media.