No Ordinary Candidates, No Typical Campaign: McCain's media, Obama's money, Russert's death

NYT: No Ordinary Candidates, No Typical Campaign
By JOHN HARWOOD
Published: June 16, 2008

....Senator Barack Obama’s status as the first African-American nominee of a major party is only the most conspicuous difference. There are others — including style, scale and the silence of the leading journalistic voice in contemporary political culture.

The style difference flows from the remarkable profile Senator John McCain of Arizona cuts as Republican standard-bearer. Eyes atwinkle at age 71, he boasts skills rare in the Republican Party for waging guerrilla war with help from the news media.

The scale difference flows from his young Democratic foe’s record-shattering ability to raise money. If Mr. Obama casts off the constraints of taxpayer financing in the general election, as strategists in both parties expect, he’ll have an unprecedented range of options for communicating with voters by being free of the spending limits that accompany public financing.

The silence is that of Tim Russert, who died last week at 58. As the leading political analyst in the American media, he played an arbiter’s role that echoed beyond the viewership of “Meet the Press” on NBC. This general election will be the first since 1988 without Mr. Russert in the moderator’s chair of that program....

***

“What makes 2008 different — and why I think Mr. McCain can be called the first post-modernist presidential candidate — is his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press,” the author Neal Gabler wrote recently in an Op-Ed column in The New York Times. “Mr. McCain’s sense of irony makes him their spiritual kin — a cosmological liberal.”...

For different reasons, so does the fund-raising talent that has accompanied Mr. Obama’s ability to draw stadium-size crowds. In his primary campaign, he raised three times the $84 million that the public financing system offers for major party nominees in the fall. Mr. Obama’s aides say he will seek to connect with voters and debunk the “just a speechmaker” rap against him, with intimate appearances in voters’ homes and workplaces. But the money he could wield would also allow him to supplement that with voter contact of extraordinary range and depth....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/politics/16caucus.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1213635950-gXfDsCgS+lH5jWAHiIpSEQ