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This week's Time Warner Summit on Politics 2008 in New York presented panel members from the worlds of politics and media.
On Tuesday, CNN's John Roberts moderated a discussion on 'Puppet Masters and Policy Maestros: Analyzing the Brains, Architects and Strategies of the Modern Campaign.' The panel included columnist Joe Klein , strategist Donna Brazile, former Bush and McCain strategist Mark McKinnon, former chief Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, and CNN political contributor Hilary Rosen.
The discussion became sort of a postmortem of the primary campaign season. Dowd suggested that if things had gone as expected, the 2008 race would have come down to Hillary Clinton v. Mitt Romney, were it not for the early strategic mistakes made by their campaigns.
Klein argued that it wasn't mistakes, but luck, and that Barack Obama owes his win to Bill Clinton's controversial comments, and that John McCain should be thanking Mike Huckabee for taking voters away from Romney.
Klein also said that McCain picking Sarah Palin was "one of the most destructive decisions" by a campaign that he had ever seen.
Dowd thought that the VP pick was when the American people decide which candidate was serious about this race.
"Barack Obama picked someone he knew he could govern with." The panel mostly agreed that Palin was picked solely for possible political advantage during the campaign.
The Palin pick was "like Halloween," joked Dowd, "where it feels really good, and then you wake up the next morning feeling sick. 'Why did I eat those seven Snicker's bars?'"
After the panel discussion, I asked Roberts (host of CNN's "American Morning") about the disappearance of the tranditional news cycle, and how he prepares for his morning broadcast.
"There is a news cycle and it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week," explained Roberts. "It tends to ebb and flow a little bit, and there typically is an ebb between about ten o'clock at night and six o'clock in the morning. That's the niche that we try to grab on to. When we come out of the box in the morning at 6am eastern we try to be 'this is what happened while you were sleeping, and this is what's going to be happening today.'"
Asked about his morning competition at FOX News and MSNBC, Roberts pushed the new mantra at CNN.
"We try to be right down the middle. We call ourselves 'the most news in the morning.' We just try to be all news, all the time. It doesn't have to be serious all the time, but it is substantive."
But he also appeared to be genuinely excited about his morning news show.
"The more news that we can jam into an hour, the happier we are...whether it be reporters, whether it be stories from live events, or newsmakers."
What has been Roberts' favorite moment of the 2008 election?
"I think probably my favorite moment, was when we were broadcasting from South Carolina. It was just a couple of days before the debate there, and the news was all about Bill Clinton, and what he was doing, and the things that he was saying. We had the majority whip James Clyburn, and I said to him, 'What do you think of what Bill Clinton is doing here, especially in South Carolina,' and he told me, 'Well, as we say in Gullah-Geechee country, I wish he would just chill.' That was really a seminal moment in this campaign, and that, to me, was probably my favorite moment."
"But there's still three weeks left, so we'll see."
