New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller reported Thursday from the McCain trail in Ohio and found "conservative and almost all-white crowds" greeting the Republican, in "McCain Excites Crowds With Criticism of Obama."
Bumiller, perhaps the Times reporter most hostile to John McCain, led off by painting the candidate as out of touch with what voters really care about:
Senator John McCain devoted most of two campaign appearances on Wednesday to lusty attacks on Senator Barack Obama and gave less attention, and offered very few specifics, to the growing economic woes of American voters.
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Mr. McCain has never been comfortable talking about the economy, and in these final weeks of his nearly two-year, second-time quest of the presidency, with polls showing him losing increasing ground to Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain and his advisers have made the calculation that negative attacks will move at least some voters. Certainly those attacks pump up crowds on the campaign trail, where it is the sharp criticism of Mr. Obama, rather than Mr. McCain's once-over comments on the economy, that draw the biggest, loudest response from the conservative and almost all-white crowds that come to see Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin.
As the crowd booed angrily at each mention of Mr. Obama's name, Mr. McCain threw himself more vigorously into his speech.
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At the same event, the Lehigh County Republican chairman, Bill Platt, twice referred to Mr. Obama from stage as "Barack Hussein Obama." Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin had not yet arrived at the arena when Mr. Platt made his remarks, and the McCain-Palin campaign later disavowed them as "inappropriate rhetoric."
Will Bumiller also criticize her own paper for calling Obama by his full name, as it did three times on its front page the day after Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention?
Bumiller went back to the well on Friday in a story coauthored with Patrick Healy in which the Times monitored a McCain rally in Wisconsin for more signs of GOP "anger" ("McCain Joins Attacks On Obama Over Radical").
The caption under a photo of McCain and Palin set the tone: "John McCain and Sarah Palin on Thursday in Waukesha, Wis. Their rallies have taken on an increasingly hostile atmosphere."
Bumiller and Healy led off with more "angry" crowds:
Senator John McCain joined in the attacks on Thursday on Senator Barack Obama for his ties to the 1960s radical William Ayers, telling an angry, raucous crowd in Wisconsin that "we need to know the full extent of the relationship" to judge whether Mr. Obama "is telling the truth to the American people or not."
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But what has been most striking about the last 48 hours on the campaign trail is the increasingly hostile atmosphere at Mr. McCain's rallies, where voters furiously booed any mention of Mr. Obama and lashed out at the Democrats, Wall Street and the news media.
Co-author Bumiller followed up her piece yesterday with another crack about the predominantly white Republican crowd:
A short time later, James T. Harris, a conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin who was one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, stood up and told Mr. McCain that in the next presidential debate, on Wednesday, "it's absolutely vital that you take it to Obama, that you hit him" where it hurts, because "we have all of these shady characters that have surrounded him," as well as, he said, Mr. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
