Day 21: October 29

6 days to Election Day

The show tonight opens with a lengthy series of clips from the Obama half-hour ad, as well as reports of (as well as an airing of) McCain's response ad. Howard Fineman joins the show to discuss; he's asked whether the ad worked, whether it made Obama look like a president, if it was too good (with Obama appearing in an Oval Office-esque room), and whether anyone was sold by the commercial. This segment, with the actual ad being shown in part and with the discussion, is half descriptive journalism and half interpretive journalism.

E.J. Dionne then joins in to talk about the state of the McCain campaign. Olbermann asks whether they will be feeling any better after the Obama ad than before, about the significance of McCain having to defend his own home state with robocalls actually during the Obama ad, whether the "...yet" at the end of the McCain response ad (as in, "Obama isn't ready...yet") undercuts the message of the rest of the ad or whether it will help bring in moderates, and why McCain praised George Bush during a campaign event in Florida and whether that will come back to haunt him. Again, this segment is rife with interpretive reporting and little else.

Next Nate Silver talks about polling, as the McCain campaign's chief pollster claimed today that the numbers were "functionally tied," while the numbers available to the public and press don't show any evidence of that being possible. Silver is asked under what conditions this claim could be true, if there's enough theoretical space between support of a candidate and actually voting for him to make it true, whether there are any good statistical measures for enthusiasm of voters or pollsters are just guessing, and whether the McCain team is just saying this because they have to or because polling really is unscientific enough for it to be possible. This is all interpretation again, and there's some clear influence from the game schema as well.

Chris Hayes is next on the agenda, to talk about McCain's new "fear card": lumping the economy and national security together, along with the spectre of one-party rule by the Republicans, at a national security roundtable discussion put together by the campaign. Hayes is asked to opine on how many "cards" McCain has left, how McCain's claims sound in light of Obama's long-form commercial, if at this point even McCain is concentrating on stemming losses in Congress (in light of his threat of "one-party rule"), why nobody has asked about McCain's claim to have a plan to find Osama bin Laden, and whether he thinks this claim is actually true. Like the rest of tonight's show, this is primarily interpretive reporting.

Today's "Worst Persons" include a "Fixed News" spokesperson who didn't "have the guts" to be named, who smeared basketball's Charles Barkley for calling FOX News "f***ed." Also, Elizabeth Dole, for claiming her opponent is an atheist when she is not, and talk radio's Dennis Prager, for claiming that equality is not an American value, but a European one. The segment has the inevitable partisan bias.

The final segment is another Campaign Comment, this time about Joe the Plumber. Olbermann makes the case that JTP is conning the entire country, as he's being passed along as an "everyman" but is using his new-found fame to leverage a publicity deal and opportunities to write a book and release a country music album. Olbermann says that he's now getting policy questions, the answers to which are even being refuted by FOX News, because JTP has no idea what he's talking about. Olbermann finished it off by offering McCain a deal: if he replaces Joe with the Brawny man, then Olbermann will "shut up." It's a funny piece (and maybe a tempting offer for McCain), but it's politically biased in tone and not really journalistically sound.