The Media, Playing the 'Gotcha' Game - Only with Palin

Snarky Media Hide Palin Policy News

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: The press spent so much time sniping at Sarah Palin for her visits with global leaders that in the end it babbled about itself. What it missed was news on John McCain's foreign policy. Who are the real rubes?

Palin's meetings with foreign heads of state in New York this week sent a stark message to the world's tyrants: If she and John McCain are elected to the highest office in the land, America will stand by the embattled nations it calls friends.

Not those nations with the most money, prestige or radical think tanks lobbying Congress on their behalf. Just friends.

What's more, by visiting with leaders of Colombia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Pakistan and India, Palin and McCain showed that premium attention will be paid to the friends undergoing the biggest tests and trying hardest to embrace markets.

Dictators and terrorists won't miss that memo. They will adjust their calculations accordingly. But the media are another matter.
Palin met Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday. Yet not one media outlet caught this undercurrent of McCain's foreign policy to stand by committed allies, derived from President Bush's drive to spread democracy.

Instead, outlets from AP to Newsday to even Fox News busied themselves hollering about access. They made themselves the story. Then they conjectured that these were "tutorials" and "burnishings of resumes" instead of messages to the world.

Obsessed with pink sofas and Alaska-shaped earrings, and on lookout for a mispronounced word, they complained that they got only a briefing, not a seat at the table. In the end, their braying only underlined their lack of interest in foreign affairs.
How do we know this? Because there really was news out there about what was discussed in Palin's meetings, like the one she had with Uribe. Details were reported in Colombian newspapers like El Tiempo, agencies like EFE and other Spanish-language press, where interest in what a President McCain means for a nation like Colombia is very real. Any American who wanted to know that was out of luck unless he could read Spanish.

This emphasis on our strongest allies is a stark contrast with Barack Obama's academic tack on foreign policy, centered on former power centers of Europe and along the beaten track of the Mideast. Those are the places where he chose to visit and meet leaders. And most of the media didn't insist on access to his private sessions.

Palin is denounced as "inexperienced" by these media, but she's no rube in grasping an emerging new world with implications for U.S. policy. In fact, she is looking at the picture with fresh, non-Beltway eyes. Countries like Colombia will grow more relevant as its economy expands, its internal war is won and the threat builds from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, armed to the teeth with big new weapons.

Obama has never set foot in Latin America. He has yet to sit down with any Latin American leader in person, though he's made the offer to Venezuela's Chavez and Cuba's Castro brothers.

His running mate, Joe Biden, reaps hay for his foreign policy experience but has only managed to set foot in two Latin American countries during his 35 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Obama has yet to negotiate with a foreign government. Palin did so with Canada, our top energy supplier and largest trading partner, to create a 1,700-mile natural gas pipeline. Obama, in fact, discounted Canada's importance in a campaign vow to break the 1994 trade ties forged in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile, as Palin assured our Colombian and Afghan allies, McCain threw attention to another media-ignored friend, Australia. The Australian on Tuesday published a 1,298-word essay by McCain on what Australia means to him and what his U.S. foreign policy means for them. The newspaper noted that Obama had also been asked to submit a piece but hadn't bothered.

That's the real shame of it all. Palin's visit with Colombia's Uribe, our battered ally surrounded by a hostile Marxist state, sends a major message to the entire region about McCain's commitment to our loyal new friends.

Obama, meantime, imagines that hate-filled, obscenity-spewing Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez will turn docile if he sits down to tea with him without preconditions. Even with that offer on the table to Chavez, he didn't bother meeting with Uribe. Don't think that a tyrant like Chavez didn't notice.

The self-absorbed media missed the real story about McCain and Palin's foreign intentions that the rest of the world is watching and reporting on. Who, again, are the real rubes?