Election '08

This President-elect Barack Obama-Spiderman comic book thing is getting out of control. First, a midtown store hires a bouncer to keep the masses at bay and now its going back for a third printing.

"To meet the unprecedented demand, Marvel is going back to press with Amazing Spider-Man #583 Third Printing Obama Variant," the comany announced in a press release, less than 24 hours after the book started selling.

Those lucky enough to get first editions could make a killing. They are going for almost $100 on eBay.)

We've been bringing you news of the Spiderman/Barack Obama comic for a week now and our tipster just wrote in with another update:

I just went down to Midtown for my weekly comics fix, and (I kid you not) there is a nightclub-like bouncer at the door and block-long line of (mostly) guys waiting to get inside that stretches from 40th and 7th to 40th and 8th. Evidently the store is only letting so many people in at once, even if you're not buying the Obama issue. "I recommend coming back this afternoon," said the bouncer at the door. Why this afternoon? My guess: because by then, the Obama issue will be totally sold out.

The President-elect is saving more than Time.

Remember that Spider-Man/Obama comic we told you about yesterday? Well apparently it's quite popular, at least in one location in Manhattan:

As of 11:30 this morning, Midtown Comics' 40th street store was getting an average of 1 call every 4 minutes about the Obama Spider-Man issue. Most requests asked for multiple-copy reservations (reply: sorry, only one per customer), and at least one caller was willing to pay $20 a copy to reserve 40 copies of the issue.

President-elect Barack Obama has graced the cover of tons of magazines and nearly every newspaper ever (saving the industry in the process).

Now he's teaming up with another superhero to save the world. In Spidey Meets the President — a new insert from Marvel Comics that will be included in the Amazing Spider-Man #583 — the prez and the web slinger team up on Inauguration Day to fight an unnamed villain.

"When we heard that President-Elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada said in a statement.

So to review, Obama wants to install a basketball court in the White House, plays fantasy football while prepping for a debate, and reads Spider-man. The world just might be safe.

What was former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's biggest regret from the 2008 campaign? Not having an opportunity to speak to the media more:

"I was not allowed to do very many interviews, and the interviews that I did were not necessarily those I would have chosen. But I was so thankful to have the opportunity to run with John McCain that I was not going to argue with the strategy decisions that some of his people were making regarding the media contacts. But if I would have been in charge, I would have wanted to speak to more reporters because that’s how you get your message out to the electorate."

The potential 2012 presidential candidate also said "The biggest mistake made was... the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media."

Because that interview with Katie Couric and The New Yorker went so well...

Over at Politico Michael Calderone got his hands on an advance copy of this Sunday's NYT Magazine which features a profile of Barack Obama's incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs by Mark Leibovich. The piece also talks about the campaign's four letter word strategy when it came to the press: Bush. It's not new news that more than once over the campaign season journalists commented and complained about the Obama camp's strict press access and control over his message, so perhaps this excerpt pulled by Calderone shouldn't come as a total surprise.

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"...Sleep two hours, wake up and cry, sleep two hours, wake up and cry."

*Part two after the jump.

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The Monday morning election quarterbacking continues. Perhaps you won't be surprised to hear that, according to those who write about such things, the media did not perform well. Over at the Washington Post the resident ombudsman Deborah Howell says that despite all its good coverage the paper came up short.

The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13...Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic.

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And this ain't even the half of it. Seriously.

So! Not surprisingly, now that the election is over, all the behind-the-scenes dirty laundry is being aired. And by dirty laundry we really mean, how Sarah Palin is solely responsible for ruining John McCain's bid for the presidency (watch Campbell Brown's excellent take/rant on this after the jump). The other day we directed your attention to Newsweek's much talked-about post-election story about Palin's heretofore unreported behavior, and just yesterday Carl Cameron went on Fox News and said "I wish I could have told you back at the time, but all of it was put off-the-record." Fair enough. But does observing the off-the-record rule excuse the entirely uncritical nature of the reports that came out about Palin for the better part of the two months she was on the ticket? Andrew Sullivan emphatically disagrees:

But actual reporters were soon finding [Palin's failings] out for themselves - and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers...They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn't come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it.

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