Josh Micah Marshall is being lambasted by media critic Bob Somerby, who portrays him as one unoriginal hack with impaired analytical skills.

A little background: Marshall followed the last presidential debate aired on Friday, September 26th as it developed, that is, in "real time." During the course of this coverage, Marshall never noticed or noted any "condescension," contempt, or the much-discussed infrequency in Senator McCain's eye contact with Barack Obama.

Indeed, the "hacktacular hack", as Somerby tagged him, pronounced the debate a "draw" on Friday night; but after watching other pundits and "polls" on the debate, the TPM creator flip-flopped big time on a Saturday post (See TPM archive) and subscribed to the official story: McCain is condescending and mean and made insufficient eye contact with his opponent.

Joe Klein and "Atrios" similarly said nothing about this line of criticism in real life. Klein originally gave Obama a "narrow victory" whereas Atrios did not watch the debate at all; but of course, they belatedly ripped McCain on this behavior, echoing what others had to say.

One excerpt:

After Josh slept on it: Josh Marshall was also upset by McCain’s vile conduct–one he had a chance to learn that this was his cohort’s Official Approved Story. On Saturday afternoon, Josh reinvented his real-time reactions, just as Klein had done:

    MARSHALL (9/27/08): HAVING SLEPT ON IT

    In my initial reaction last night, I wrote that while I thought the debate was basically a draw, that amounted to a narrow win for Obama since foreign policy is supposed to be John McCain's forte. Now, after half a day, with more time to think about it and the benefit of seeing initial polling data and surveying other people's reactions, I'm only confirmed in that view.

    In fact, I think it was a much bigger win for Obama than I was ready to figure last night. And there’s two basic reasons.

Huh! After “seeing initial polling data and surveying other people's reactions,” Josh had rethought his outlook too. He gave “two basic reason” for this. His first reason didn’t really make sense, as you can see from reading his piece. But in his second “basic reason,” he, like Klein, suddenly found himself very upset by McCain’s rude conduct:

    MARSHALL (9/27/08): Whether it was contempt or condescension or some sort of fear or inability to–in the most literal senseRoll it all together and Obama just seemed like a bigger person than McCain. And in a race in which the issue agenda and party identification already work strongly in Obama's favor, that's an advantage that is very hard for McCain to give up.

Just like Klein, Josh now found himself upset by McCain’s contempt or condescension–the contempt or condescension which had made McCain look small and angry. But how weird! In real time, Josh live-blogged the entire debate–and he completely forgot to mention these outrages as they were actually happening! His first mention of this troubling phenomenon came late in the debate, in response to an e-mail. This is what he wrote. Sorry–Josh’s archives have been down, so we can’t seem to recover a link:

    MARSHALL (9/26/08): 10:26 PM. I haven't focused on this myself. But a number of readers are writing in to say that McCain has not looked at or made eye contact with Sen. Obama once this evening. Have you seen that?

“I haven't focused on this myself,” he reported. It isn’t clear that he’d even noticed. But so what? By the next day, Josh was very upset about this vile misconduct. It made McCain look small and angry, he wrote, long after the fact. –face Obama, it made McCain look small and angry. I apologize that I can't link to them because I don't remember who wrote it. But as someone wrote after the debate, for that kind of attitude to have “worked” for McCain, Obama needed to come off as completely ignorant and unprepared. And I don't think even his harshest critics believe that is what happened.

We’re seeing a pattern: As you may recall, Josh did much the same thing after the crucial October 30 Democratic debate. Midway through, he was gushing about Hillary Clinton’s performance. (“Here's the thing with Hillary. Not always inspiring answers. But, man, she never flubs an answer. Simply unflappable. Like a machine. And I mean that as a compliment.”) By 11:37 PM, he had started to get mildly in line with emerging clatter about her deeply troubling “driver’s license” answer. By the next day, though, he had begun to scramble. “It got a lot rougher [for Clinton] toward the end,” he wrote–although he hadn’t said a word about this problem in his live-blogging. “She does seem to be taking it [her position on the driver’s license matter] to an almost absurd length,” he now wrote–although he said nothing about her answer in real time. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/31/07, with links to Josh’s posts.

Link: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh092908.shtml