MSNBC's Scarborough: 'Hillary Is My Girlfriend'

Did the press favor Barack Obama over John McCain, and, if so, was it partisanship or something else? Could John McCain have won with a different campaign? Was Sarah Palin the right pick for vice president?

These are some of the questions debated last night at a panel discussion hosted by The Week. Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg, Republican strategist Ed Rollins and Democratic consultant Bob Shrum were the panelists.

Highlights:

-Scarborough, who was in top form throughout, introduced himself with a joke about his on-air dropping of the F-bomb yesterday: "I have a show on MSNBC with Mika Brzezinski called Morning Joe, now with a seven-second delay." Big laugh.

[Update: Actually, he wasn't joking.]

-More Scarborough: "We actually had a combination of the most brutally efficient campaign ever run on the Democratic side against one of the worst I think anybody's ever seen on the Republican side. John McCain had no overall strategy. He had a lot of day traders."

-Stahl: "I give a lot of credit to McCain personally for helping Obama to win the election."

-Weisberg: "One thing that isn't talked about a lot but is virtually unique in American politics is [Obama's] skill as a writer. I think Obama used his sensitivity to language and his ability to move people with words in a way I haven't seen anybody do...He's someone who, if he were not in politics, probably would be a professional writer."

-Rather: "The Republicans picked the candidate who had the best chance. I'm not sure that John McCain could've won if it had not been for the economic meltdown, but I did have a mind coming out of the Republican convention, the race looked even, and in my own mind I thought it was shaded ever so slightly toward McCain."

-Rollins, who worked for Mike Huckabee in the primaries, said McCain never vetted the Arkansas governor as a possible VP pick. "I think either Romney or Huckabee in the end would've presented a better campaign for the Republican party."

-Weisberg: "The press had a non-ideological bias in favor of Obama because he sells newspapers."

Shrum on whether McCain was the victim of press bias: "He's like the 1962 Mets. They didn't get a lot of good coverage in the New York Times... The myth is that it's all because of the financial meltdown....Conservatives, when they lose, and they don't like to lose, always tend blame the press, number one, and the press didn't do it. McCain did it. Katie Couric had every right to ask those questions."

Rather: "Journalism loves the new, and Obama was the new. Obama represents something newsworthy and historic....It had to do with a bias toward the story. Obama was the best story."

-Scarborough: "All you have to do is look at the election this year to see that the bias, which we Republicans usually say is ideologically-based -- I learned something this year. It's not ideologically-based. It's more culturally based. Ask Hillary Clinton whether press coverage during the primary was fair....I said time and time again in 2000 that your candidate, Al Gore, got much worse treatment than George Bush. I looked at Bush, and we were for Bush, but after the third debate, we said to [inaudible], 'How much longer is it going to take the press to figure out this guy doesn't speak English?'"

-Weisberg: "I think there was media bias in favor of Hillary Clinton, and here's why. It was virtually mathematically impossible for her to be nominated from late March on, and the media continued to pretend that there was an active campaign. And the reason is it serves the interests of the media to have the campaign go on longer."

-More Weisberg: "Obama captured the imagination of the country, and that includes journalists, who are human."

-Scarborough: "I love Hillary. She's my girlfriend. We don't like to talk about it much."

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