In Love and Hauteur
Obama and the press, sneering together
NOEMIE EMERY
The press is in love, really in love, the kind of love that comes twice in a century. Sure, it has had crushes before — on John McCain and Bill Clinton — but those were mere infatuations, and the ardor ebbed quickly. In the cold light of day, the press is finding McCain not quite as cute as they thought him; and as for the old flame, Bill Clinton, when the going got tough and he took swipes at its new love, the press tossed him under the bus and backed over him, most notably with a particularly salacious hit piece — by the husband of one of his former assistants! — in a recent issue of Vanity Fair. That previously Clinton-loving magazine now has a passion for Barack Obama, as do Time and Newsweek, which embarrass themselves on a near-weekly basis. NBC exists mainly to ooze Obamadoration, with other news outlets not far behind.
“Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon,” write John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei of Politico.com. Harris thinks some of his reporters need “detox” to get over their rapture, while VandeHei adds, “There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama’s speeches and promises to change politics.” What causes this madness in rational people? Nothing too mad: similar outlooks and interests in common. The press and Obama are a match made in heaven. This isn’t insanity, but the product of wholly predictable forces, coming together in an outcome that seems preordained.
Obama was not born into the elite, but he has joined it by training and by inclination, and in this sense his journey mirrors that of the press, which began as a trade that drew people from all parts of the culture but has become an exclusive profession, staffed largely by upper-middle-class people who feel a strong sense of mission and an equally great self-regard. Now it shows all the signs of an institution in an advanced stage of decadence: It has built a multimillion-dollar shrine to itself in Washington, along with numerous schools and institutions study its “excellence” (which seems to decline as these studies proliferate), and it convenes endless panels to extol its importance and mission, even as scandals plague its most prominent newsrooms and its ratings and circulation figures decline.
As a result, the press becomes more and more like the academic community, Obama’s electoral base, which is similarly out of touch with the larger American public. His support in the press approaches that in the college towns, where he rolled up impressive majorities. Bill Clinton came from Hope, as did Mike Huckabee, but to the press Obama has become Hope personified. Journalists are Obama’s disciples; he is their prophet, the mirror in which they see themselves. And journalists spend a lot of time looking in the mirror.
As the press changed, it altered its view of the country: from tough love combined with celebration to a relentless, unending critique. Its practitioners’ main theme was that people unlike them (their readers, for example) were dumb, biased, afraid, reason-deficient, and easily manipulated (by Republican agents) to act on their resentments and fears. In 1984, after Reagan won 49 states, James Reston, dean of the press corps, mourned journalists’ failure to enlighten the masses: “Among the losers in this presidential election campaign you will have to include the nosy scribblers of the press,” he lamented that dire November morning. “Not since the days of H. L. Mencken have so many reporters written so much or so well about the shortcomings of the President and influenced so few voters. . . . Most Washington reporters were on to his evasive tactics, easy cheerfulness, and unsteady grasp of the facts. They did not hesitate to point out his deficits, personal and fiscal, condemn his windy theorizing, and mock his zigzag contortions, but Mr. Reagan had the photographers and television cameramen for allies and proved that one picture on the nightly news can be worth a million votes.”
Today’s press is still using this all-purpose critique to account for, and tarnish, Republican victories: “The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and-middle class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities,” Newsweek explained recently, warning that “it is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as ‘the other’ — as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots.” This same kind of explanation was dragged out to explain why Reagan beat Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale, why George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis, and why George W. Bush beat Al Gore and John Kerry, in the latter case with the help of nearly 300 of Kerry’s Vietnam War comrades, who thought their old friend was a fraud. The press hated the 1988 campaign, with its furlough and Pledge of Allegiance issues, and loathed the testosterone fest that was the Republicans’ 2004 convention, in particular the speech by Zell Miller, which stunned and appalled most of the media but made little impression on voters.
So when Obama appeared — cool, suave, urbane, and much hipper than they were — they had found their revenge and their voice. They were thrilled when he said that wearing a flag pin was a meaningless gesture and proposed a new kind of patriotism that did not include cheering. They nodded in approval when, listing laudable ways of serving one’s country, he included the Peace Corps, teaching, and community service, but left out the armed forces. When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for 20 years, was criticized for delivering tirades against whites and American culture, they defended Obama, not least because many of them agreed with the preacher; some blamed the critics of Wright’s racism for being racists themselves. And when Obama told a well-heeled crowd at a billionaire’s home in San Francisco that small-town Pennsylvanians “cling” to religion and guns from misplaced desperation, they were not at all bothered, as that was what they had believed all the time.
). But your whole post misses the point, which is the on-going pervasive lib media pro-obama bias.
