Media Assaults Palin While Brushing Aside Biden’s Gaffes

Anyone who pays the least bit of attention to the campaign has to have noticed the double standard applied by the media in its coverage of the two vice presidential candidates, Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden.

Posting at RealClearPolitics, Jack Kelly brings into focus the differences in how the media treats Palin and Biden, and he also points out how the importance of experience is dismissed when speaking of Obama, but held up as a major shortcoming when speaking of Palin.

Kelly starts out with a few of Biden’s recent gaffes:

One wonders how Sen. Joe Biden can talk so much with his foot in his mouth.

‘‘‘We're not supporting clean coal,’ the Democratic vice presidential candidate said while campaigning in Ohio last week. ‘No coal plants here in America.’

“Coal mining is an important industry in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, all tightly contested states in this election, so Sen. Biden's remarks were impolitic. Especially so since Sen. Obama supports clean coal technologies.

“‘Obama's Department of Energy will enter into public-private partnerships to develop five 'first of a kind' commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology,’ the Obama-Biden campaign Web site says.

“Sen. Obama's efforts Tuesday to depict Sen. John McCain as too quick to oppose a federal bailout of insurer AIG were undermined when he was reminded by NBC's Matt Lauer that Sen. Biden had said the same thing on the same day.

“‘I thought it was terrible,’ Sen. Biden told CBS news anchor Katie Couric in an interview broadcast Monday. ‘If I had anything to do with it, we never would have done it.’

“Sen. Biden was referring to an Obama ad that mocked Sen. McCain as an out of touch old fogy because he doesn't use a computer.

“The ad was terrible. (Sen. McCain doesn't use a computer because his war injuries prevent him from typing on a keyboard). And it testifies to Sen. Biden's basic decency that he thought so. But there are some opinions you just don't voice.

‘“In the same interview, Sen. Biden told Ms. Couric: ‘When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.’

“Franklin Roosevelt didn't become president until three years after the stock market crashed in 1929. Television didn't go into widespread commercial use until years after FDR died in 1945.

‘“Sen. Biden has said something foolish or indiscreet so often the Republican National Committee has started a ‘Biden Gaffe Clock’ to chronicle them all. Can you imagine the media frenzy if it were Sarah Palin who was saying these things?

“Sen. Biden wasn't chosen to provide comic relief. Sen. Obama thought his 35 years in the Senate, most of it on the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is now chairman, would give the ticket foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama himself lacks.

“The most hypocritical of the legion of double standards employed by the news media in this campaign is that a paucity of experience in foreign policy is considered disqualifying in the Republican candidate for vice president, but inconsequential in the Democratic candidate for president.”

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