Has Drudge lost his mojo? If even Mark Halperin, once Drudge’s most devoted MSM acolyte, is turning against him, it must be a sign of some shift in the zeitgeist.
And it’s true. Drudge has been all but irrelevant this campaign season, flogging one pro-McCain story after another, each lamer than the next. The race is tightening! The B girl! Obama kicks the Washington Times off the campaign plane! His talent for the seizing on the most outrageous cable news-friendly stories — those having to do with the base urges of politicians, the darkest trenches of the culture wars and, of course, hurricanes — seems to have deserted him. Has the Drudge moment that began in 1997 with the Monica story finally passed?
We can only hope. I’ve always found Drudge interesting, but his influence over the cable news networks and political journalists is undeserved and arbitrary. They were lost in the wilderness and cowed by the success of Fox News, so they seized upon Drudge – who gave them those links and page views – as a kind of Moses to lead them to … what, exactly? The fallow point for Drudge-ism may have come in September, when the McCain campaign was dominating every news cycle with one outrageous, Drudge-tailored lie and misrepresentation after another. It became so ridiculous that media outlets, against deeply ingrained habits demanding a “both sides do it” false equivalency, began calling BS.
There are a couple of obvious reasons for Drudge’s fall from the pinnacle of MSM influence. As Eric Boehlert noted, this fall’s economic crisis instantly became the dominant political story and overall story — but it’s not a good Drudge story, despite of his fondness for tracking the Dow. Too complicated. Too policy-oriented. Drudge stories have a voyeuristic quality – you’re watching someone else’s trainwreck. But the economic crisis is everybody’s train wreck. We don’t want lurid headlines about how our 401Ks are evaporating.
The other reason is that Drudge went all-in for McCain. McCain is still running a Drudge-friendly campaign, hitting all the hot buttons it possibly can. But it is also a losing campaign, one a majority of people aren’t buying. The big story here is Obama, who’s all uplift and inspiration and cool. Also not a good Drudge story.
Bill Clinton was the best thing that ever happened to Drudge. Obama, who despite his star power cultivates a kind of strategic political blandness, could turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Drudge.
