Murray: Obama 'detached' and McCain 'a lousy campaigner'

Shailagh Murray fields questions from students during her December visit.

The Barack Obama campaign was "ridiculously efficient" and run like a disciplined corporation, said Washington Post political correspondent Shailagh Murray.

In the fifth annual Jack E. Holden journalism lecturer in early December, Murray said, "Covering the Obama campaign was actually kind of boring. It was really just a business plan that unfolded."

She said this might have helped Obama on his way to victory but that it made it difficult to do original reporting.

It began in January 2007 while Obama was considering running for the presidential nomination. His exploratory committee found that "American voters were ready to re-engage in political processes," she said.

Millions of voters who signed up to be on e-mail lists received targeted first-hand updates from Obama's staff as the campaign unfolded. Murray said the only group Obama lost were white voters over 65.

She covered the Illinois senator from the day he declared his candidacy. One of her most vivid memories happened in late January in a South Carolina gymnasium. "To see all those old ladies in their church hats - that's something that stays with you," she said.

Despite the adoration, she said, Obama is "detached guy - very serious and not particularly likeable in a John McCain sort of way," she said. He wasn't in the back of the plane "eating pistachios with the press corps. He was up in the front of the plane eating pistachios and reading Foreign Affairs," she said.

While likeable, John McCain "is a lousy campaigner," Murray said. "If he were running against a lamppost, he would have lost. It was sad to see."

In Obama, "the idea of him represented catharsis to the Bush administration and Clinton partisanship. In this one individual, all these hopes and expectations have boiled down," she said. He has tremendous opportunities and a tremendous burden, she said. Murray said that 300,000 people applied to work for the Obama administration. She also said that Obama has plans to turn the e-mail database into a device that will help create government policy by interacting directly with citizens.

So he can go to Congress and say, "Fifty million people can't be wrong."

"Big government is back," Murray said. "We are in the banking business. Now we're about to go into the auto business. And this is all going to be a very activist government."

Murray said she hopes the news business can make the adjustments it needs to make to cover it. But she said, "There is very little light at the end of the tunnel."

With a slide behind her that read "Big Election, Small Journalism," Murray said. "We have the situation with fewer and fewer journalists but still a massive content demand. It's not even turnover anymore, just contraction."

Asked how newsrooms compete with news aggregators, she said, "For a while there was a tendency to chase anything that was successful." Now, after the campaign, many political bloggers have been laid off, she said. "A lot is just news organizations trying to find a formula that works."

When asked about advice Murray had for those going into journalism, she replied, "The business is contracting, but it's not going away. Even though there are fewer journalists to cover the hard news, the demand is still as high as it's ever been. These are just tough times."