Amy Goodman had a great interview a few days ago with Jane Mayer, author of The New Yorker’s The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin. . The transcript is up at AlterNet. Mayer traces the Palin promotion path–as the new Alaska Governor to the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. There’s a lot of interesting info in the article, but I wanted to pull out two main points.
1) The conservative media helped propel Palin into the national spotlight and basically land the V-P position. They were able to do this because they a) have a successful echochamber and b) their influence is so strong in the beltway, DC circles–the politicos listen to them. This is a stark contrast with the innerworkings and influence of the progressive media.
It all started out with the heads of the conservative media meeting Sarah in her own home in a sort of skewed version of “Who’s coming to lunch?”
The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.
This got the ball rolling and when the contingent headed back to D.C., the Palin praise train started rolling out of the station. Mayer notes that many of the lunch guests had become full blown cheerleaders.
The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”
The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.”
But as Mayer noted in her article, by February 2008 the “the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate.” Palin demurred at the time, but her star was on the rise. During the V-P selection process, McCain REALLY wanted his good buddy Joe Lieberman, but his political operatives gave him the big “talk to the hand,” noting Joe (the Senator) was too liberal on domestic issues and sent him in the direction of a little-known, arch conservative, charming woman from Alaska. And the rest is history.
I find this fascinating for a few reasons. One, I don’t know of any traditional progressive media outlets or individuals who from the ground up, will actively promote and then crown potential candidates in such a way. The progressive media speculates, bets and discusses to death the pros and cons of various candidate options. When they feel ready (and if they are able), they will endorse. The progressive blogosphere has actually started to fill this gap by actively promoting and raising funds for candidates across the country, but the influence beyond the chorus is unclear.
When you look at the sphere of influence that the conservative publications have within their own party and the mainstream media, it makes you stop for a second to ponder the potential. But maybe that’s the corrupting influence of power overtaking me. The most important take away for me is that the conservative media has made sure that the beltway establishment doesn’t ignore them (or can’t, even if they want to.) The progressive media is starting to move in that direction, but still has a long way to go to have the same level of influence.
2) The other major point of this article that really struck me was the efforts by one man–Adam Brickley and where he came from. Mayer tells Goodman that Brickley was one of the main individuals that lifted Palin up above the masses.
Brickley, who is just out of college, and he is a staunch conservative, he’s looking for somebody who could add some pep to the Republican ticket, and he particularly is worried about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as, you know, a possible combination. So, anyway, he’s looking for a female. And he starts with Wikipedia, and he just looks for all the females in the Republican Party. And he told — I interviewed him — he says at some point, you know, he couldn’t find anybody good, and then he thinks, oh, what about that lady that just got elected in Alaska? So he looks up things about Sarah Palin and sees that she’s considered kind of this rising star.
And so, he starts a blog that’s called Sarah Palin for Vice President Blog. And it starts pushing Palin and gets picked up by many other conservative blogs and then finally works its way into kind of conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh, and the American Spectator, conservative magazines. So there’s this sort of growing groundswell.
Ok-great. We’ve heard the story of the lone ranger become a powerful powerbroker in the blogosphere before. And we love it. But I find this nugget much more interesting.
Mayer says that Brickley has “gone to the Leadership Institute, which is an organization that Morton Blackwell, an evangelical Christian, founded a couple decades ago to train sort of cadres of the right wing…. He’s also received scholarships from various right-wing organizations. He currently is living in a dormitory that’s part of the Heritage Foundation here in Washington, which is another big right-wing think tank. You know, he’s been trained in how to kind of help the conservative movement and how to become part of it. So, he’s pushing Palin, and his blog gets a lot of traffic. And so, there’s kind of this nexus of these forces coming together, both of which are really Washington forces that are pushing Palin.”
The training of young, media savvy progressive political activists is in full swing, but we are still CLEARLY far behind them in the active caring and feeding of them. The conservatives give their young leaders a career path. We give them fits and starts. This is not a new or brilliant notion, it’s just one I wanted to reinforce.
All in all–I’m not interested in the progressive media becoming king or queen makers, but I am interested in determining the means and infrastructure for raising its influence among the individuals and groups that are. What are the first steps? It would actually be interesting to survey D.C. insiders to see what progressive media they consume and why. Who wants to work with me on that???
Neiman Journalism Lab has a 
