The Meme Prisoner and the Media Darling

[TacticalPeek]

The Meme Prisoner

In the press, Hillary has been trapped by her own story, whereas Obama has been freed by his.

* By John Heilemann
* Published Feb 14, 2008

The day after the notably down-and-dirty Nevada caucuses, I asked Hillary Clinton if, on occasion, her campaign had been wont to play the game a tad too rough. Now and then, Clinton allowed—then quickly pivoted and trained her fire on Barack Obama’s operation. She argued that his campaign had incited racial animus by playing up her remarks about Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. That it had made “what I thought was a breathtaking charge that I was in some way responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.” That it had “basically condoned a really mean-spirited” Spanish-language ad in Nevada that asserted Hillary “does not respect our people.” Without pausing to catch her breath, Clinton concluded, “There’s no outcry. There’s no drumbeat. And so I accept that I will always be under a higher level of scrutiny; it goes with the territory.”

The scrutiny Clinton was talking about was media scrutiny, of course. So I asked if she agreed with her husband’s loudly voiced view that there was a double standard inherent in the coverage of her and Obama. “I don’t go there,” she replied, waving one hand in the air. “Certainly, a lot of my supporters express their feelings about it. But I just don’t think about that because it’s not a useful thing for me to think about.”

Whether Clinton is actually so Zen-like about this topic—and, really, who would be?—her adjutants are adamantly not. Instead, for the better part of a year, they have complained to any reporter who would listen about what they regard as a manifest pro-Obama, anti-Hillary tilt in the press corps. With the contretemps over David Shuster’s “pimped out” comments about Chelsea Clinton, this line of argument has become more heated, to be sure, especially as it pertains to NBC and MSNBC. (“A horror show” is how one Clinton adviser describes her nightly treatment by Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and even Brian Williams.) But it’s connected to a long-simmering sense of grievance that’s deeper and more subtle.

That the campaign exaggerates its degree of outrage, and Hillary her victimhood, in order to gain a tactical advantage is obvious. But that doesn’t mean their critique is meritless—quite the contrary. The more interesting question, however, is what role each campaign has had in fostering a media dynamic that has clearly favored Obama and plainly damaged Clinton. And also whether that dynamic will come back to bite Obama if he’s the Democratic nominee.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/44211/


You ain't seen nothing yet.

[phantom power]

1. I also liked the closing paragraph:

Well, really the whole article was quite good.

The implications of Obama’s and Clinton’s respective meta-narratives for their press coverage have been profound. For Clinton, the inability to change the story line meant that any vaguely negative maneuver was interpreted in the darkest possible light, for it reinforced a preexisting supposition. For Obama, however, any criticism could be fended off as a manifestation of grubby old politics. And any act he committed that could be perceived as nefarious created cognitive dissonance. As Just points out, a prime example is the case of Tony Rezko, the now-indicted Chicago fixer and slumlord to whom Obama has been linked for many years. “There was no way for the press to believe it wasn’t true—because, you know, it looks like people are going to jail,” she says. “So instead the press dismisses the story as an aberration.”

The trouble for Obama is that the Republicans aren’t terribly likely to let that dismissal stand—nor the polite avoidance of discussing his controversial minister, his wayward youth, or, indeed, his blackness itself. Again and again, as Clinton often points out, the GOP has proved painfully adept at taking compelling, carefully honed meta-narratives and blowing them to pieces. In ways too numerous to mention, Obama has been toughened up by the primary process. But no matter what his handlers say, the notion that he’s been subjected to the most withering press scrutiny imaginable is—how to put this?—a fairy tale. His success has turned in no small part on his skill at avoiding such flyspecking, and on his rival’s inability to muster the same kind of dexterity. If Obama winds up facing John McCain, a man whose meta-narrative is spun from pure gold, he is unlikely to be so fortunate again.

[TacticalPeek]

2. Kick

:kick: