Bill Clinton is Right
The Politico reports (from now on we’ll have to take everything they report with a huge grain of salt, but here we go nonetheless) that former US President Bill Clinton lashed out at the media yesterday, saying that the MSM treats his wife in an unfair manner. He also implied that Hillary will be forced to go negative on Barack Obama.
Again, he’s right. I’m paying attention to the media, etc. and what’s fascinating to see is that Hillary is called “polarizing” just about whenever they speak of her. Why is she polarizing? If you go back to the first days of the Clinton presidency, what happened? The reason is simple: Republicans hate her guts and attack her constantly. She’s polarizing because her political opponents attack her.
Awkward.
And Clinton is right to point out that Obama has been treated very differently by the media than Clinton has. Obama is, for a part, a media invention. It’s the media that made him big and it’s the media that wants him to be the Democratic nominee, who can then run against John McCain. That seems to be the ticket the media is hoping for at this point in time. The narrative has been written, they’re now going to follow and repeat it time and again. Obama is the big surprise of this campaign, he’s the uniter, eloquent, inspiring, hopeful, whereas Clinton is cold, overly ambitious and polarizing.
O, and mean.
Why Americans don’t see through this is beyond me. It’s glaringly obvious.
"The narrative has been written, they’re now going to follow and repeat it time and again. Obama is the big surprise of this campaign, he’s the uniter, eloquent, inspiring, hopeful, whereas Clinton is cold, overly ambitious and polarizing."
It’s the politicization of the media that is the problem. See, the media has this self-description of at least being objective or a proper destillation of the real world. It cares about ratings mostly yet still pretends it has some utilitarian, important otive at its core.
On the web there are plenty shock-jocks on both sides who can get attention simply for sublimating the cognitive/emotional fixations of others. But the rest are usually quite decent - since everybody knows they are seen as subjective from the start they have to be level-headed and somewhat open in order to attract a wider slew of readers and they also have to be more creative and self-conscious to keep these new readers. Lastly, since there actually is interaction anyone can be disproven or countered at any point - there is nothing like this in the media save for the jazzed-up debate hours or the banter between whatever male mummy and female barbie doll Fox News have decided to pair up.
I don’t agree one bit with the media’s narrative - while I agree for the most part with the notion that the two candidates have very different appeals in the ephemeral/rhetorical/demographical sense there is no need for repetition.
I disagree when Bill says that the past skeletons in Hillary’s closet have been EXONERATED! People just don’t trust her, and she is an extension of him. This guy’s used to lying his way through every single crisis that Clinton Inc runs into. She’s never been exonerated about the cattle futures windfalls, since there was never full disclosure. She’s never been exonerated about having her so-called health care task force operate in secret in direct violation of the laws. In fact, that was confirmed. She’s never been exonerated about any of the Castle Grande lies and overbillings - or how the missing Rose Law billing records just happened to show up near her office, conveniently, right after the statute of limitations expired. She’s never been exonerated for her role in the Whitewater development…but hey, that was only a simple resort scam designed to fleece seniors. She’s never been exonerated about her role in the disgraceful Travel Office scandal, where nonpartisan career government employees all lost their jobs to make room for her friends, nor for trying to cover it up with a fraudulent IRS audit and criminal charges against Billy Dale - charges which took a jury only minutes to laugh out of court. How about the FBI files on her political opponents, which were illegally obtained by her chosen aide, Craig Livingstone? How much of that information did she copy? How much does she still have and plan to use? Exonerated? I don’t think so. As I recall, one of the deputy independent counsels during Whitewater even prepared a draft indictment of her for perjury, which Janet Reno quashed. That’s not exoneration either. Not in this universe.People have memories and her continuous and repetitive use of lawyerly double-talk has created a back-narrative that is a burden no other candidate can equal—though McCain with the Keating Five and others have minor bodies buried somewhere. Even a media used to overlooking peculation on the left & blowing up pseudo-events on the right into teapot-tempests is now coming to the conclusion that the backlog of negatives in her/his histories have reached a critical mass.And the voters don’t want a rehash of all this either. Obama & Huckabee are doing so well because relatively speaking, they are tabulae rasae, clean slates without a long history of dodgeball evasions.
For the same reason, I think Giuliani & McCain have problems that Thompson does not. Huckabee & Thompson may outlast McCain & Giuliani [whom I've been plumping for a year as the best RED ticket. But John & Rudy may have their back-stories bite them. Rudy more than McCain.]
Doubtlessly the media has a narrative, and some politicians end up on the losing side of it. They try to create movies, and todays movie is about the plucky young idealistic politician triumphing against the hard-nosed insider cynics. I don’t think they’re making that story up by the way, but it’s only a part of the story, and they choose to concentrate on it because it’s the most romantic.
I don’t trust Hillary. I don’t feel her to be a principled person, a person who wouldn’t change her views 180 degrees if she thought it could get her more power. In that sense, I trust Huckabee more. I don’t agree with him on a whole lot of issues certainly, but I DO think he really believes what’s coming out of his mouth, most of the time. If he says he wants to to A, B and C, I believe he will try if elected. The matter becomes merely if I want to see A, B or C enacted. With Hillary, I feel like I might end up getting R, Q and X instead.
Part of the narrative IS unfair, to be sure, but isn’t the Clinton camp saying that she’s the adult in this? That she’s the big girl that can handle the pressure, that’s been through it all and won’t let it faze her?
Bill may or may not be right, but you can’t play leader and underdog simultaneously. Attacking the media as being unfair to your candidate works for underdogs, makes people feel that the candidate is being cheated by "the system" and want to rebel. NO ONE takes Hillary as an underdog, she’s made damn sure she’s thought of as the most powerful and near-anointed candidate, who knows all the right people and can work the system like a harp. She can’t switch to underdog status now, no one is buying it.
That’s exactly right, Lynx, but it’s exactly what the Clinton’s have always done. They want it both ways- they want to portray Hillary as tough, but then they constantly respond to any criticism by trying to drum up sympathy for her.
Personally I thought Bush 41 handled it right; when he was getting lots of bad press during his presidential campaign he laughed it off and they had bumper stickers which said "Annoy the media, elect George Bush."
Of course the media has a narrative about her; they do this for all of the candidates. Do you think it’s necessarily fair that Thompson is portrayed as lazy and tired? No, but there is some truth to it and that’s why he can’t live it down. Same with Hillary- read Daveinboca’s comment and you’ll see there’s plenty of reason that people distrust her; it’s not just fiction or an emotional reaction to her. Do you really think that the GOP just woke up one day during Bill Clinton’s campaign and said "hey, let’s work people up into a frenzy and get them to hate this guy’s wife?" No, it was because of things she said and did.
It was glaringly obvious to me when I looked her in the eyes that the media portrayal - while perhaps somewhat amplified - was pretty spot on.
… except my opinion was formed well before the Media’s.
…. and I doubt they got it from me