jake gets it (finally)

... even if he still won't say it.

i guess getting schooled on political dogwhistles on camera has opened abc new's jake tapper's ears a bit to mccain's acutely pitched ad strategy:

how many young white women professing adoration for sen. barack obama, d-illinois, can you count in this anti-obama web video that the campaign of sen. john mccain, r-ariz, was sending out yesterday? one ... two ... three ... four ... sure are a lot of young white women in this thing ... why do you think they put so many young white women professing their love for obama in what is clearly an anti-obama video? what would possibly be negative about young white women liking sen. obama?

yes, jake, what would that be?

we know what that means

too polite to plainly parse mccain's ad strategy for what it is, too cowardly to call a spade a spade, so to speak, this week panelists jake tapper, george stephanopolous and george will get politely schooled by david gergen on what he, donna brazile and everyone else in america already knows:

tapper:	... that's not fair. the media has been very vigilant on the attacks against obama that are race-based. whether it was, uh, questions of things that clinton and clinton supporters said, or the scurrilous ads coming out of various state republican parties, the media has been viligant — vigilant — but by the same token we're allowed to say "hey, wait a second. you're lumping in mccain making racial ads, uh, attacks, when it's clear he hasn't done it."
gergen:	i-i-ah ... [sighs] i think that donna's got a point here. everybody knows he's black, but there has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream — other — he’s not one of us ...
steph:	mostly below the radar screen —
gergen:	it's below the radar screen. i think the mccain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. everybody knows that. and when he said — there are certain kinds of signals. as a, as a native of the south, i can tell you, when you see this charlton heston ad, 'the one,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' y'know we, everybody gets that, who is from a southern background. we all understand that. when mccain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'i'm against quotas,' we get what that's about. we understand where that's coming from ...
steph:	i answered the question —
will:	[pointing to steph] he was asked about that!
gergen:	i understand that, but i'm just telling you that gets across, and so it's not unfair for him to sort of bring up the fact: "hey everybody knows i'm black. what are you talking about?"
steph:	hey george, that may be his only strategy ...

if stephanopolous is referring to mccain's strategy, that's something else that everyone already knows.

changing the storyline

abc news washington correspondent jake tapper discussing charges of media bias in the persistently bleak coverage of iraq with howard kurtz, host of cnn reliable sources, march 19 2006:

kurtz: jake tapper, in this morning's washington post, donald rumsfeld, the defense secretary, has an op-ed pieces which says, in part, "history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on web sites, or the latest sensational attack. history is a bigger picture." now, since you are just back from iraq, do you believe the journalists provided a distorted picture, or did it seem different to you when you got there than you might have expected? tapper: it's a very complicated question, obviously. what journalists, when, who, what are you talking about specifically? i think that there is a lot of violence still in iraq, and i think that if you listen to commanders on the ground and if you go to iraq, you'll see that that security situation is an incredibly important one. and as much as the pentagon may not want to talk about it or may want to talk about the positive, the parliament and the elections and the things that are being achieved, which are tangible achievements, the violence makes it very difficult to get past, you know, the daily boom. let me just — one quick story. we wanted to do a story about the freedom of the press in iraq, and we went to the set of a new iraqi sitcom that they're filming, because there's been — there's all this entertainment now, and it's one of the things that the ambassador there has trumpeted. kurtz: so what happened? tapper: we got there, and the guy who had set it up with us — we shot — we shot for a little while, and the guy who had helped us arrange it was assassinated the very morning while we were there on the set. and so our cameras were rolling while the director and the producer and the cast and crew found out that the guy that had green-lit the show and the guy that had set up our being there was killed. so no matter how hard we try to cover the positive, the violence has a way of rearing its head. kurtz: talk about changing your storyline.