A critical Republican campaign strategy is working when it comes to framing for the November election. Despite actual facts, media reporting increasingly reports that there is no difference of import between John McSame McCain and Barack Obama when it comes to the arenas of energy and Global Warming. Take David Kesterbaum’s NPR report this morning
If you are trying to figure out whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential race, the issue of climate change may not be much help. This is one area where both leading candidates for president do not have a lot to disagree about.
Shallow, misinformed, and misleading reporting is about the most polite way to describe Kestenbaum’s report which focuses solely on selected sound-bytes rather than the substance of the two candidates’ positions.
Sadly, shallow, misinformed, and misleading reporting is not limited to Kesterbaum. Take for example this Houston Chronicle article earlier this week entitled “Energy plans alterntive in nature, similar in goal … experts see little difference in two candidates’ overall strategies“. Starting with the fact that the article quotes only one “expert” (thus “experts”?), the plans and concepts the candidates have proposed are radically different.
These media reports indicate that a fundamental McCain strategy is working, the efforts to greenwash McCain into something that he, those that surround him, and those that fund him are not. The desire is to create the impression of distance between McCain and Bush, while McBlurring McSame McCain‘s differences with Barack Obama. As Rachel Maddow has put it, calling John McCain an 
environmentalist as part of the campaign strategy is to “run on someone else’s record“. The more appropriate description might be ‘potentially not as disastrous as most in the Republican Party as part of McCain’s recycling of George Bush.’
Sadly, from NPR to the Houston Chronicle, this deceptive strategy is proving fruitful.