Senator John McCain’s US election campaign is faltering, it seems, as he struggles to wrestle the media spotlight away from his Democrat rival Barack Obama.

The pro-Republican Fox News network has reported that “John McCain is working overtime to grab headlines while Barack Obama enters the thick of a high-profile tour abroad that has all but transported the US media overseas.”

And not just the American media: Obama’s tour of the Middle East is making news around the world. The BBC is one of many global news providers broadcasting stories about his pledges on Iraq and Israel, following on from footage of him breakfasting with serving US troops in the region.

In contrast, McCain got the headline “McCain Dogged by Potty Mouths at Town Halls” on foxnews.com as he continues a grass-roots tour across the US heartland.

Two different election strategies
There are two ways of looking at this. McCain is carrying on a great tradition of successful presidential candidates by meeting as many of the electorate as he can. In days gone by candidates would address crowds from the back of a train at every station it pulled into – giving us the phrase “whistle-stop tour”. It gave men like Franklin D Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman a chance to wow the crowds with their oratory skills, and in return the pair occupied the White House for 20 years.

On the other hand, Obama is demonstrating his commitment to salvaging America’s foreign policy – one of the key issues of the 2008 presidential election. He hopes he can convince the public he can be trusted with the highest office in the land; and hopes that he can do so through the medium of TV and the internet, divorced as he is from meeting them face-to-face.

Headlines or blog posts?
Which election strategy is most successful will only be known in November. But it’s a fair guess that most people would bet that Obama is doing the right thing by winning the headlines.

The way the public builds its opinion of politicians has changed since the advent of television. History hasn’t recorded whether anyone asked FDR whether it was true he’d “called his wife a c**t”, which Fox says was one of the questions posed to McCain at a town-hall meeting in Iowa.

Elections: won in living rooms
This election, more than any previous one, will be won in America’s living rooms and not in its town halls. But the internet will also play a greater role than ever before, and by meeting the people who write the blogs, create the Facebook groups and start the email chains – rather than those who broadcast the pictures and write the headlines in the traditional media – McCain’s grass-roots strategy might still have something going for it.

According to Nielsen’s BlogPulse, which records the volumes of online chatter about different subjects, McCain has consistently lagged behind Obama in terms of online “buzz”. But the gap has closed considerably since early June, which may indicate some success for McCain’s tactics.

Time will tell, of course, whether ‘online buzz’ can be translated into votes, for either candidate. We may still be some way away from a Rupert Murdoch organ – like FoxNews, or The Sun – proclaiming that, “It was MySpace wot won it”. But it may still be worth tracking for anyone taking their election betting research beyond the news headlines.

Posted in The Grandstand View