On Friday night’s PBS NewsHour, pseudo-conservative analyst David Brooks insisted Obama’s new campaign ad is bogus and un-factual, but since that sounded too anti-Obama, he added that "if the Republican Party is going to look backwards, at least he can try to look forwards. And that's probably a good, decent strategy.”
Brooks felt no such need to balance when Mark Shields suggested Gingrich (politically) was a “great first date,” and Brooks mocked Gingrich’s multiple wives:
MARK SHIELDS: When Jim Lehrer of recent and fond memory, a great colleague used to do these debates, he would go out beforehand and tell the audience, no yelling, no screaming, no this, no applauding. And if it happens, I'm going to put the camera right on you and humiliate you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And they knew better than to disobey.
SHIELDS: They did. But I will tell you, that really makes for a debate. This becomes you're playing to the audience, and it changes everything. And nobody's better than Gingrich at that. He's a great first date politically. He really is.
WOODRUFF: Very quick. . .
DAVID BROOKS: Not for his wife. (Laughter)
Brooks did suggest voters in South Carolina saw Gingrich as "Braveheart," but he continued to state he was "unelectable" and that his multiple marriages are a political problem.
Notice PBS ran a chunk of Obama's new ad, but not the anti-Obama ad that Obama's people are attacking:
WOODRUFF: President Obama ran -- started running this week first television ads in a handful of swing states. Let's just take a look at part of the ad the president's campaign is running.
NARRATOR: In America's clean energy 2.7 million jobs and expanding rapidly. For the first time in 13 years, our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent. President Obama kept his promise to toughen ethics rules and strengthen America's energy economy.
WOODRUFF: David, what does that tell you the Obama campaign is thinking about right now?
BROOKS: They're not doing a lot of fact-checking, because that 2.7 million jobs includes bus drivers, garbage collectors. It's kind of a bogus statistic.
But they're trying to get out there. And I guess they're trying -- I guess he's going to run on clean energy. I think it's a little dubious thing to run on. But he wants to show some sort of forward-looking job creation. I'm not quite sure why they're out there with this particular ad at this moment. But, you know, I guess, if the Republican Party is going to look backwards, at least he can try to look forwards. And that's probably a good, decent strategy.
People would argue that PBS isn’t completely in the tank for Obama could point to both PBS pundits dismissing Obama’s Keystone pipeline dismissal as completely political:
WOODRUFF: Speaking of energy -- and this has to be very brief -- the president did turn down the Keystone oil pipeline this week. Now, it looks like it's a temporary decision, Mark, but smart move, what?
SHIELDS: Totally a political move -- basically said, we're turning it down, "wink," and we will revisit it after the election. I think it gave the Republicans the rhetorical, as well as the political advantage on jobs.
BROOKS: Yes. It could lose -- if they really did it -- 10,000 to 20,000 jobs. It's bad for the environment, because that oil will just get shipped over to China, so I think, substantively, a disastrous decision, but a politically cynical one.
