Day 17: October 23

12 days to Election Day

The show starts out with polling data -- a series of polls in battleground states were released today, and Obama leads by significant margins in basically all of them. Meanwhile, McCain is trying to cast himself as a fighter who isn't going to give up (not even in the face of such grim polling numbers). John Harwood comes on the show to talk about the state of the campaign. He's asked whether there's any good news at all in the polls for McCain, what will happen to the campaign when Obama goes to see his ill grandmother, what effect Sarah Palin's upcoming policy speech will have, and whether McCain will make any effort to change his focus from Joe the Plumber before the election. The predominant theme of this segment is the game schema -- the talk is all about polls and who's winning and who's falling behind. Even just the term "battleground state" has implications within that frame.

Next Olbermann talks to David Axelrod about where the campaign stands and what's to come in the immediate future. He asks about his reaction to the new poll numbers, whether he thinks they're being "misled" by the polling in Indiana, what the significance is of the AP poll that had a 1% separation between the candidates, whether Obama should be campaigning in states won by John Kerry in 2004, and what the content of the upcoming half-hour Obama commercial will be. This segment is a bit awkward, because it seems essentially that it's just a platform for one of Obama's advisers to promulgate talking points. It seems overly politically biased, even compared to some of the things Olbermann has done before. To be fair, though, Axelrod is an important figure, and thus a good source to talk to. It's doubtful that a McCain strategist would appear on the show, though.

The next segment is a discussion of a new trend of Republicans endorsing Barack Obama, and a sort of mutual attack mode between John McCain and the rest of the Republican Party. Olbermann and Margaret Carlson analyze the situation: he asks her what exactly is happening, why McCain didn't start directly opposing Bush much earlier, how intense the internal backlash in the Republican Party over McCain's new denouncements of Bush policy is, and whether Sarah Palin is now thinking ahead of this election and trying to get herself out early (that is, to try to avoid being overly associated with losing). This is run-of-the-mill Countdown interpretive reporting.

Next, Olbermann and Sam Seder talk about comments made by Freedom's Watch former chairman Brad Blakeman, who said that he believes that Obama's use of a campaign jet to go visit his sick grandmother was worse than the large sums of money spent on wardrobe for Sarah Palin. Both men are outraged -- Seder says he doesn't know "whether to be offended by the stunning insensitivity or just the stunning stupidity of this guy," and Olbermann calls him a "lunatic." They also talk about the Republican tradition of "fake umbrage," as well as whether this would be different had the tables been turned. The outrage of the segment smacks of political bias.

Today's "Worst Persons" were the New York City Council, congressman Robin Hayes, and Bill O'Reilly. The council voted to overturn voter-mandated term limits for its members and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Hayes claimed that "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God," then denied saying it, then denied that he denied saying it. "Bill-O the Clown" gets the nod for being a Gordon Liddy apologist and for thinking that 1998 was 20 years ago. As always, this is the prime example of political bias on the show.

The final segment is a Special Comment that, unlike most others, is aiming at humor. In it, Olbermann basically begs John McCain to stop using Joe the Plumber as a campaign strategy -- first, because it hasn't worked at all, and second, because he's annoyed by it. It's pretty funny, but there's really not much of a point to it -- it accomplishes nothing journalistically, and it's moderately politically biased against McCain (Olbermann mentions a "years-old Republican strategy about campaign strategy: find something irrelevant, inappropriate, or ineffective...hammer it and hammer it and hammer it until people promise to vote for you if only you'd stop").