Boots Alleged Conservative Reporters Off His Campaign Plane

Barack Obama's campaign has ejected reporters working for three newspapers from its traveling plane in the final days of the election, drawing fire from conservatives who see a pattern: all three media organizations endorsed John McCain.

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According to WABC Radio's host Mark Levin, a former chief of staff in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department, Obama has said he was not happy with the constraints of the US Constitution. In an audio tape of an interview, Obama questions the validity of the US Constitution when it comes to government programs. "Levin apparently is correct -- Obama has no regard for the First Amendment," said political strategist Mike Baker. "I've read about incidents where the Obama thug-squad threatened radio station and television news directors if they aired any negative Obama news stories," said Baker. Levin, who also heads the Landmark Legal Foundation, believes an Obama Administration coupled with a Democrat-dominated congress and senate will ignore the US Constitution in order to further their socialist goals. Reporters from the Washington Times, the Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, and the Dallas Morning News were told last night that space had run out on Obama's plane for his final campaign swing. The conservative-leaning Drudge Report website fueled the story today by suggesting that the newspapers were frozen out because their editorial pages have endorsed McCain. The Washington Times added to the controversy by publishing a story criticizing its exclusion. "This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth," Times executive editor John Solomon said -- echoing the McCain camp's recent attacks on Obama for suggesting that tax policy should help "share the wealth." "[W]e spent hundreds of thousands of dollars covering Senator Obama's campaign, traveling on his plane, and taking our turn in the reporter's pool," Solomon added, "only to have our seat given away to someone else in the last days of the campaign." Although the Times and Post are considered conservative media outlets, the US press traditionally maintains strict separation between editorials and news coverage. In an email quoted by the Times, the Obama camp said the exclusion of the three newspapers was prompted by dwindling space, not ideology. "Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply," Anita Dunn, a senior Obama adviser, wrote. "This means we've had to make hard, and unpleasant for all concerned, decisions about limiting some news organizations and in some cases not being in a position to offer space to news organizations altogether." The McCain campaign has had its own share of controversial ejection from its traveling media corps this year. Joe Klein of Time magazine and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, both liberal-leaning columnists, have been barred from the McCain press circuit after publishing articles critical of the Republican nominee.