Disaster of the Week pushes political issues out of the limelight

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting Pro-McCain/Palin opinion piece and video that briefly addresses the idea of political sound bytes.

Recently, Disasters of the Week have been in the news far more than the campaign, but, no matter the topic, reporters seem eager to know what candidates are saying. Hurricane Ike, the impending stock collapse - certainly the candidates "real" political issues have been put on the back burner. Additionally, a good portion of recent campaign news has been centered on misspoken sentences, poorly worded phrases, and political gaffes. Is this phenomenon creating a race where Americans are choosing a candidate based on sound bytes and personality, rather than politics?

It's clear that McCain has had a rough few days because of his flip-flopping on the state of the economy. This blog entry by Marc Ambinder does a nice job of spelling out some of the gaffes-made-sound-byte from the McCain campaign over the last week or so. I'm not sure how damaging one (or even several) of these mistakes would be for a candidate, but when mistakes are endlessly analyzed, parodied, and replayed (as the media is fond of doing) the effect can snowball, much like the infamous Howard Dean scream.