I know around July 4th, it’s customary for bloggers to post snippets from inspiring speeches or quote Thomas Paine or something, but the thought going through my mind all weekend is that our political system is completely revolting. Considering the gravity of the choice that lies ahead of us, the way we choose who runs our government is truly despicable. I can’t think of any better example that illustrates this than the “controversy” over Wes Clark’s comments.

Let’s start by restating the obvious. Wes Clark’s comments were factually true and well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Enduring through the horrors of a P.O.W. camp don’t qualify you to be the President of the United States any more than suffering through a painful bout of cancer will make you a good piano player. One does not beget the other, even if it does make your biography seem more heroic.

The truly shameful part of this whole episode is that it was the press corps who created and fueled this bogus controversy, not the day late and a dollar short McCain campaign. It was the pundits themselves who had to pick their jaws up from the ground when someone had the audacity to suggest that McCain’s stay at the Hanoi Hilton didn’t magically give him the judgment, skills, and temperament to be president. The press have been the biggest purveyors of the notion that John McCain’s experiences in Vietnam makes him “presidential”, but when somebody finally asked “Why?”, they flipped the hell out.

As much as I was disappointed by Barack Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to initially “reject” Clark’s comments, I can’t say I blame him. As much as I’d love Obama to be the transformational political figure who never cowers before the brain-dead pundits and is willing to speak the truth, even when it’s politically uncomfortable to do so, he’d have to be superhuman to fix the media. How do you take on a news industry that not only does McCain’s campaign job for them, but is so intent on having the presidential campaign unfold with some advertiser-friendly drama that they’ll insist on holding Barack Obama accountable for any statement made by a Democrat?

Obama’s follow-up comments on the Wes Clark, that he was a busy guy who’s got better things to do than explain the words of others, were a much better response to press mendacity, but by then it was too little, too late. There aren’t many do-overs in politics, so even if Obama got his reaction right the second time around, it doesn’t undo the damage of his initial rejection of Clark. It’s hard to push back at a media onslaught that insists that you respond to meaningless shit that’s only of interest to political junkies, but this incident provides a good example of the downside to a rapid response.

I understand the temptation of the Obama campaign was to throw Clark under the bus and hope the story goes away. The longer the story lingers, not only is McCain subtly reinforced as the “war hero” candidate, but the Obama campaign’s silence is interpreted through the lens of a hostile press. If Obama truly respected McCain’s sacrifice, he would have said something by now, right? But the flip side is that by acting too fast, you run the risk of not only looking like a jackass to your base, but reinforcing negatives that the media and Republicans are trying to portray (ie. Dems are weak, Obama is a flip-flopper, etc.).

There’s a lot of things I want from candidate and future-President Obama, but I don’t think it’s realistic to believe that he’ll be able to stand up to every instance of media dishonesty and escape unscathed enough to win the election. I think the challenge he faces is not unlike the challenge Hillary Clinton faced in the primary (as I described it in Feb.).

For a candidate who constantly touts herself for being “prepared” to be president, Clinton’s lack of preparation in dealing with an antagonistic media doesn’t bode well for her prospects in a general election (much less her ability to govern). A smart campaign would take media bias as a given and come up with a plan to mitigate these negatives, yet this week, Hillary has settled on the strategy of whining about the press being mean to her, seemingly blind to the fact that this is an industry full of yellow journalists who have spent the past fifteen years printing and broadcasting some truly shameful muck. Was the Clinton campaign really naive enough to think they’d be any different this year?

Obama’s challenge is similar. The media’s oh-so-precious conventional wisdom is that John McCain is a maverick war hero with a history of reaching across the aisle to get. things. done. Barack Obama is the new kid on the block who can deliver a pretty speech but doesn’t have much experience beyond his quaint time in the Illinois legislature. Can these archetypes be busted? Probably, but that’s the framing against which most news in this campaign will be reported. That’s what Obama has to work with, so if he’s still stumbling whenever McCain’s POW experience is mentioned, then we’ve got a problem.

The key here isn’t to run against the GOP and the media, but to work the media refs and get them to do your dirty work for you. With a sharper media strategy, the Obama campaign can make the press corps laziness work to their advantage, but in order to do that, they need to not only do a better job of responding to stories that they’d rather see disappear, but make sure that every characterization of John McCain emphasizes negatives that the press has internalized and will thus help perpetuate (McCain is old, Bush’s third term, etc.). The Obama campaign has done a great job on this front so far, but when they spend the last week and a half playing defense on McCain’s turf, they are losing opportunities to re-frame McCain.

So as much as I would love to see Barack Obama call the press on their lazy and inaccurate reporting whenever it pops up, I’d also like to see him win. If I had to choose between the two (which seems to be the case), then I’d prefer the later.