I don't know much about Saturday Night Live but in a recent speech in Spartanburg South Carolina, Obama said: I’m running because I don’t want to wake up one morning four years from now and turn on one of those cable talk shows and see that Washington is still stuck in the same food fight it’s been in for over a decade. I don’t want to see that more Americans lost their health care and fell into bankruptcy because we let the insurance industry spend millions to stop us for yet another year. I don’t want to see that.

Here's how one American responded:

Vision...... Promise..... Justice..... Fairness.... Equality.... Honesty..... Strength.... Solutions... Substance... Hope........ Conviction.. Change...... Bravery..... Partnership. Democracy... Transparency Peace....... These are only some of the things that he conveys in this piece. I am just a regular guy, with a High School education, but I get it. This speech conveys the Promise that I used to think America was all about. He has my vote. I am a 47 year old white guy, that isn't offended by the fact that he admits to having used drugs when he was a teenager. I have a father that was and is Racist. Yet all throughout my childhood, I was told how we are the country where "all men are created equal" yet I saw how that simply isn't true. Then I saw those same people that rejected those basic tennants of our Constitution turn around and call others "un-American". I believe the world has had enough of our duplicity and hypocracy, and I hope there is a majority of people in America that feel the same way. The "Greatest Generation" did their job and antied up and kicked in to save our nation and the ideals that we used to hold so dear. I pray that there are still enough of those among us to anti up now and kick in for our own children's future. We have seriously been disengaged for far too long, and I fear we are staring at the brink for our country. I believe that Barack Obama is EXACTLY the right person, at the right time. I am for America, and I am for Obama.

Thank You,

Steve McGuire

SNL often reflects the subconscious feelings voters have, or the ones they share at the water cooler, but that are too unformed for professional pundits to feel comfortable to express. This bit is in that fine tradition:

Hillary--looks and acts like the winner, but the winner who, as in many high school student government contests, no one really likes. She could be defeated if one of the cool kids were to run against her, but hardly none ever choose to enter those contests, instinctively feeling the Hillarys of the world win them. She is smug and self-righteous but also lacking in self awareness of those flaws, laughing right over them.

Richardson--the suck-up extraordinaire.

Obama--the only one who is willing to take Hillary's costume at face value and not claim to be seeing something else, but also so darned earnest and concerned with his moral vanity that he won't even pretend to be different on Halloween. Still, also sort of the cool kid who might just be able to bring down the snug student government "winner."

Right on the nose. The "Me Me Me Me Me Me" candidate O-Bomb-A obnoxiously dressed as himself!

yosemite, dude/dudette, ease up. I really don't think Saturday Night Live is part of the Welch Conspiracy. Hillary's campaign chose to claim the mantle of frontrunner back in September when she did her Sunday Show blitz and started sending out the subtle notices to local pols that it was time to get off the fence and onto the bandwagon. But being frontrunner isn't all cookies and cake, even when you're a gurl. Getting smacked around by SNL and the news media is part of what comes with that.

Here is a full 27 min video of the speech mentioned above
It's pretty fantastic. This SNL story sadly kind of overshadows the speech.

Of course the national media is going to go after Clinton, as they always do with the top person in the polls at about this point.

But of course they also participated in making Clinton the top person in the polls by giving her such favorable coverage up to this point, which was also perfectly predictable.

So, while I agree that everyone should be very skeptical about the way in which the national media frames things, that certainly cuts both ways.

yosemite wrote on November 4, 2007 2:42 PM: The real question for the rest of this cycle is whether the progressive community is going to accept biased framing by moderators / pundits on these kinds of issues without examining their overall track record and economic motivations. It was only after Media Matters put the spotlight on Frank Luntz that MSNBC stopped using him for its televised Presidential focus groups -- though they surely knew his partisanship before using him.

Indeed. The real question for independent or undecided Democrats is whether they are going to accept biased framing "effectively" and "widely" disseminated by institutions Sen. Clinton admittedly "helped to start and support."

Clinton at Yearly Kos (2:40):

We are certainly better prepared and more focused on, you know, taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere, and a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institutions that I helped to start and support, like Media Matters and Center for American Progress...

yosemite,

As it happens, Obama has already experienced the same effect. For example, many in the national media insisted on framing several of his foreign policy positions as gaffes, even while polls showed broad support for his positions.

Again, the only thing I would stress is that this is usually a back-and-forth proecess: in Act I the press frames things to build someone up, then in Act II they frame things to tear that person down. And if they get the chance, in Act II they will then frame things to support a redemption storyline, and so on back and forth for as many Acts as they have time to write.

Obama in that sense is actually a bit ahead of Clinton in this process, because he had his Act I positive coverage back in the spring, and his Act II negative coverage in the late summer/early fall. So Act III (redemption) may be on his way, while Clinton is still going through Act II.

By the way, here is today's most ridiculous use of the phrase "abandon the politics of hope":

In response to a speech in which Obama said that the 2008 election is "a chance to come together and finally solve the challenges that were made worse by George Bush, but that in fact existed long before George Bush took office. Challenges like health care. Challenges like energy. Challenges like education," Clinton campaign spokesman Zac Wright said, "It is disappointing that as his campaign stalls, Senator Obama is abandoning the politics of hope and launching a negative campaign against both Senator and President Clinton."

Thank you--this has been today's most ridiculous use of the phrase "abandon the politics of hope." Tune in tomorrow for yet another installment of this ongoing (and apparently neverending) series.

molly,

It is SNL. They don't exactly hold themselves to journalistic standards.

And in fact that was pretty soft by their standards. If you really want to be offended, you could check out this:

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/93/93spatrol.phtml

yosemite,

I don't know if you actually clicked the link I supplied, but it was to the transcript for a 1993 sketch in which SNL was much harder on Bill and Hillary themselves, not some "others".

Anyway, I just find it very odd for people to be complaining that the implications of this particular sketch were "unsupported". Given the nature of the show, that is pretty much a given.

Helloooooo!!!!! It's SNL!!!!! It's a comedy show!!!!!! It's an equal opportunity offender!!!!

Yosemite

thanks for the daily howler link. I might take this issue more seriously about the 'staging' of the debate IF there was a focus on G. Stephanopoulous as moderator in the IA debate, when clearly the frame up was to 'pile-up' on Obama. There was no coverage in the press about the partisianship or bias of the moderator then by Daily Howler which makes his extensive coverage now suspect as it seems to only support the Hillary team spin on events. If as you assert this was an unbiased source and perspective on news media we should have the same coverage focus of both those events. We do not.

More importantly, I think the attack on the press now is just another spin from the Clinton camp. To mask her failure to answer substantive policy issues and her being exposed as the double-talker that she is on policy issues. The press and bloggers seem to go along with whatever spin is put out from the Clinton camp, whether it was the gender victim card she is playing or the press attacked me card. This is clearly seen by juxtaposing the responses of the candidates and the moderators with the IA vs. PA debate. If folks want an unbiased take they need to watch how each candidate handled ANSWERING the questions when they were clearly being opposed from multiple rivals on the stage, as well as the moderator.

Until someone writes a balanced piece where they look at BOTH of these instances I will continue to see this as more spin from bloggers and journalists who have created the media narrative surrounding the 'inevitability' of Clinton and who simply are not giving fair coverage to Obama when it comes to providing him with in-depth articles to demonstrate how his experience not only matches but exceeds Hillary's in key areas, especially foreign policy.

As far as Media Matters goes, they are a biased source when it comes to debunking anything that is not supportive of Hillary Clinton. David Brock is the equivalent of Norquest for the GOP...he is a democratic operative funded and supported by the Clintons with the explicit purpose of countering the 'vastringwing conspiracy'. Hillary has come out and said that. Brock was formerly a GOP operative that has gone over to the other side. He trashed Anita Hill for the GOP during the Thomas hearing.

I beleive that Luntz's focus group response clearly matches the public response we are seeing on the ground in terms of the size of the crowds (15K folks darn near everywhere and even TEN THOUSAND in Iowa City IA) are confirmation that Obama is saying and doing what the American public wants, along with the significant numbers of donors as well as the the magnitude of his fund raising all virtually shouts that there is a huge number of folks in the Democratic party base funding the insurgency of Obama's candidacy. Clearly, a large part of the electorate believes it is time for the Clintons to move on. Luntz's focus group tells us that the electorate is responding to Obama's message..just as the firt post on this thread demonstrated. It is the media who is not carrying the message about Obama. Brock is nothing but a sycophant for the Clintons.

I really liked Media Matters until I noticed they provided no coverage on how Hillary's foreign policy stance was clearly wrong and how inconsistent she is on major policy issues like Iraq, universal health care, torture, telecom immunity. I would expect Media Matters to have told us about Hillary's earmarks but they have not. Media Matters should have had posts telling us how the foreign policy advisors Clinton has on her team were all wrong about the Iraq war and how all of Obama's foreign policy advisors were RIGHT on the Iraq war. Which would have been timely when Albright was brough out as Hillary's supporter following her 'naive and irresponsbible' attack on Barack. They have not do so. Obama won that foreign policy debate. Media matters should have said that. They did not. So IMHO, their credibility is wholly suspect and not to be relied on when it comes to coverage of Hillary Clinton.

It is quite clear that Hillary is the corporate candidate and she gets the positive press coverage and Obama can barely eek out an interview on the press except for when they want to use his words to spin the story the way the Clinton team wants it spun. That is easily discerned by the way in which the questions are framed when Obama is interviewed.

The press is complicit with Hillary's campaign, Media Matters is an extension of Hillary's campaign, this site TPM was a democratic opposition reasarch team for the democratic party and Obama is simply not getting the coverage that the response of the electorate clearly warrants.

The status quo has to go.
We need experience we can believe in not more washington insider double talk. We need change we can trust.

I give 5 thumbs up to the very first post of this thread...McGuire has the message right DESPITE the media coverage and all the conventional wisdom of the pundits.