The comments you quote from the Obama conference call added little to the issue. However, there is a larger point here.

The ABC debate was a proxy for media coverage as a whole. The reason ‘bittergate’ had little effect on the polls is that voters (even the elevated ‘white working class’) truly reject the type of parsing and guilt-by-association politics that the media emphasizes and promotes.

Obama represents that disgust with the media and rallies those who are tired of the media trying to interpret and filter the news. The media has yet to understand this.

I disagree with other Fray comments that you are biased against Obama. However, your ‘equal-equal’ ‘tit-for-tat’ equivalency formula for the Clinton/Obama campaign shows that even the more far-sighted media does not yet get the scope of voter rebellion against it.

First, the Clinton campaign started the negative campaigning. This is not school yard blaming. It is fact. Obama held back from ‘going negative’ as long as he could but had no choice but to push back in some way.. And mostly he has taken the high road in doing that. I doubt you would disagree on this.

Second, the voters are saying that the media can’t differentiate what is important to voters and what is trivial.. I started questioning Hillary’s foreign policy ‘experience’ in Fray comments last November. So did a lot of other people. I asked whether she was in the ‘situation room’ when Bill Clinton decided to bomb Iraq in 1998. Or whether she was at the table in Camp Davi 2000?

For 19 debates no one in the MSM asked Hillary to back up her claims. If this wasn’t one of the most important questions to be investigated in campaign 2008, I don’t know what was. Yet even the more progressive press gave little effort to investigating Clinton’s role in Bosnia, Ireland, etc.

And there is a huge difference between ‘saying what I know was not the case ‘ (Clinton on Bosnia) and responding to a loose connection between Obama and Ayers, who even Mayor Richard Daley hired to advise him on education policy. The former is a lie, the latter a smear.

All I can say to the media: “Somethin’s going on here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.”