Photo credits: APScanning the online media this morning has been a dizzying exercise. I’ve gone from suggestions that the press has finally overcome its intoxication with Obama to at last recognize Hillary Clinton as the more substantive candidate to Keith Olbermann’s on-the-air, blatantly misogynist comment that someone should physically beat Clinton up to force her out of the Democratic race.
To prepare myself for the usual assault on Hillary Clinton that I’ve learned to expect from the media, I began at the NY Times with Paul Krugman’s predictably Clinton-friendly comments under the heading, “Self-Inflicted Confusion.”
Krugman begins:
“After Barack Obama’s defeat in Pennsylvania, David Axelrod, his campaign manager, brushed it off: “Nothing has changed tonight in the basic physics of this race.”
“He may well be right — but what a comedown. A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it’s talking about math. ‘Yes we can has become ‘No she can’t.”’
Krugman explains Obama’s inability to win over the working class and sweep easily toward the nomination this way:
“From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.”
At the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz rambles all over the place, highlighting first the unfortunate timing of Jeremiah Wright’s attempt to set the record straight in a media blitz including Bill Moyers, the NAACP, and the National Press Club.
Kurtz goes on to cite Michael Novak’s astonishment in the National Review at the turn of events since Pennsylvania. Novak asks, “Did Pennsylvania Deflate Obama?”
"It always amazes me how swiftly the narrative can change. Seemingly in an instant, serious commentators reverse the direction of their analysis and change their tone of voice, while their excitement level shoots upwards. Monday, it was all: 'No matter what happens in Pennsylvania, Obama has the election all locked up.' Wednesday morning, it is 'What a great, gutsy victory it is for Hillary. Hillary is really a fighter. She won labor-union households, those over 40 years old, white men and white women, churchgoers, hunters--and most of these by high margins. She won Catholics by 70 percent. These are the groups a Democratic nominee must win against McCain in November.'
"Some are even now working out the arithmetic to show that it is possible for her to win the popular vote by the last primary, June 6. Possible, but not likely."
I felt a touch of euphoria over at CNNpolitics.com when I read “The Week That Clinton Came Back.”
The CNN piece notes the biggest question about Clinton’s campaign for weeks had been “when it would finally succumb to being so second-place.
“This week that changed. She won the Pennsylvania primary by 10 percentage points, a margin that convinced contributors to flood her Internet site with $10 million.
“The win and the windfall don't change the race. She is still behind in every way that matters. But the race has changed anyway.
“In the six-week build-up to the Pennsylvania primary, Obama's well-run campaign lost some of its luster.
“Americans learned that his former pastor gave angry anti-American speeches, that Obama was friends with a former terrorist, and that he seemed to think small-town voters "cling" to God and gun-ownership because they're bitter about the economy.
“Obama supporters blame Clinton for negative and nasty campaigning, but she didn't pick his church, his friends or his words for him.
“Clinton was always more appealing to ordinary, working-class Americans than Obama. While he based his campaign on the promise of 'hope' and 'change,' she offered a catalogue of policies and programs to address concrete concerns.”
The CNN piece concludes: “Clinton has argued consistently that she should win the Democratic nomination because she'd be more likely to defeat the Republicans and win the White House.
“If people nationwide think like the ones in Pennsylvania, she may be right.”
My head was still spinning when I checked in at the Huffington Post, Obama’s chief mouthpiece in the blogosphere. HuffPost’s political editor Tom Edsall is perturbed that “In a blink of an eye, the media has jumped ship from the Obama campaign and become a crucial Clinton ally, pressing just the message -- that Obama is a likely loser in the general election -- that Hillary and her allies have been promoting for the past six weeks.”
Edsall laments:
“The new tenor of media coverage is visible almost everywhere, from Politico, Time and The New Republic to The Washington Post and The New York Times.”
What Edsall apparently missed, however, is a piece by Rachel Sklar in today’s Huffpost, where only an occasional pro-Clinton piece is allowed. Sklar responds to an over-the-top comment by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC (watch video):
"Olbermann was discussing the election with Newsweek's Howard Fineman, a frequent guest. The topic was, how can a winner finally be determined in this never-ending Democratic race for the nomination? Of course, the assumption was that it was Clinton that should be shown the door (despite clearly still earning her spot in the race thanks to, um, voters). Fineman said that, all the delegate math aside, ultimately it was going to take 'some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this.'
"Said Olbermann: 'Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."'
Sklar asks: “What does that mean? Really, it can only mean one thing: Beating the crap out of Hillary Clinton, to the point where she is physically incapable of getting up and walking out. At minimum. We know this. We know this because we have all seen movies where people are invited into private places to have "discussions" and the unruly party is, um, dealt with accordingly. It's an unmistakably violent image.”
Incredible.
One of the cruelest realities I’ve faced in the Democratic primary is that many who describe themselves as liberal are liberal in every way except when it comes to equal rights for women; Olbermann is obviously such a tragically flawed liberal.
Nevertheless, I conclude my post today with a sigh of relief that overall the media in America finally appears to be coming to its senses.
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