Two e-mails landed in my Gmail inbox late last night, the first from the McCain campaign and the second from Obama’s team. Notice the order and the subject matter:
In case your eyes are as bad as mine (or you aren’t using Firefox 3.0’s nifty zoom feature) how about we blow up the relevant detail of that image:
So John McCain’s staff sends out a tribute (complete with video) to the too-soon late, great “Meet the Press” host and NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, and 45 minutes later, Barack Obama’s staff sends out a commercial solicitation. Remember the Titans vs. Buy More Stuff.
I’m reminded of WashingtonPost.com’s botched e-mail alert the morning Sean Taylor died, and just a tiny bit that recent Sunday e-mail from Newsweek that somehow managed to omit that edition’s only negative story about the Obama campaign. This one is a bit more esoteric — how many outside the Beltway are on both candidate’s e-mail lists?
Well, just about any reporter covering national politics. They matter, right? And unlike WPNI’s newspaper and magazine, the Obama camp at least has a rapid response team. I have no doubt this e-mail alert was prepared and schedulded well in advance of Friday afternoon’s terrible news. But because e-mail alerts can be timely, they must be timely. The Obama campaign must know this — after all, they beat all other presidential candidates with the first campaign e-mail of the New Year.
Would it have been so difficult to recycle a few of the candidate’s comments from earlier in the day? They needn’t even go as far as the McCain campaign did — the specially-recorded tribute video is a little more personal than McCain’s tarmac remarks early Friday afternoon, reflecting on the fact that he made 52 appearances on Russert’s “Meet”. [Update: As Sean Hackbarth notes in the comments, this was clearly something McCain himself wanted to do.]
Checking my inbox archives, I see this is the first time the Obama campaign has flogged its online store in an e-mail subject line since the last Christmas shopping season. But they have sent no e-mail acknowledging (let alone mourning) Russert’s untimely passing, and I can’t even find a release on the website. I know the Obama campaign is sort of running against insider Washington, but wasn’t Russert pretty much the best kind possible?
For anyone who bothered to open up those e-mails in succession last night or today, the juxtaposition looks like this:
Especially when you consider that national political reporters who worked alongside or in competition with Russert are the most likely to have noticed this discrepancy, the advantage here goes to McCain.
P.S. The McCain e-mail could use more color and better design, but they should get credit for rendering the text in actual ASCII/Unicode characters.
P.P.S. A personal favorite “Meet the Press” episode was the morning of May 27, 2007, where Russert’s calm, methodical questioning laid bare Bill Richardson’s surprising inability to defend himself on almost anything, from the serious to the trivial. Russert managed to do gotcha without seeming gotcha, and the hour-long interrogation was one of his most effective. That was the real end of Gov. Richardson’s presidential campaign. The transcript is here.
It’s a classy, respectful gesture. But spending time and money honoring a journalist who many of his supporters probably didn’t like very much doesn’t seem like it will net him much in terms of support or fundraising. And reporters, political wonks, and others who would be moved by such an email will likely have already read his statements on the matter.
Meanwhile, Obama will probably make tens (hundreds?) of thousands in merchandise sales from his comparatively crass email.
I hate to sound like I’m bashing what is an admirable action by the McCain campaign since I certainly don’t intend to. He should be applauded for taking the time and money to honor someone who was such an important force in journalism. But in terms of realpolitik, I don’t see what his campaign gains from it.
I can’t believe many will open Obama’s e-mail. If you want a decent open rate you don’t send it out late on a Saturday night.
As for McCain’s video this feels like something he insisted on. I can’t imagine a communications or media person thinking it would be a great idea to spend all that time filming and editing a video along with building a microsite. The costs outweigh the gain. So I think McCain wanted to make a tribute.
And my Russert moment is when Fred Thompson was on last fall. Russert got him to say he opposed a federal abortion amendment. That sunk him with a lot of social conservatives and allow Mike Huckabee to gain momentum in Iowa.
Thank you for the salute to Tim Russert. He will be missed!