G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
The press seethes over Bill Clinton, shrugs at George Bush
By Eric Boehlert
Created Feb 5 2008 - 2:34pm
Two presidents made headlines last week: The current one, for delivering [1]
his final State of the Union Address, and the former one, for making miscues
on the campaign trail.
Which was deemed more newsworthy? For the press, the choice was obvious:
Bill Clinton garnered an extraordinary amount of press attention -- more so,
in fact, than any of the Republican candidates running for president,
according to one news survey [2].
That simply highlights the media's over-the-top [3] obsession with Clinton.
What really struck me was the difference in tone from the recent Bush and
Clinton coverage. The sitting president was delivering his final State of
the Union, capping off his failed presidency, which has provoked [4] deep
despair among most Americans [5] about the future of the country. And for
that, Bush has been tagged the most consistently unpopular president in
modern history.
Yet the reaction from the press and pundits last week when marking the final
chapter of the Bush decline was mostly to shrug their shoulders and look
away. The media has, throughout Bush's gruesome political collapse, shown
very little interest in taking part in the usual Beltway pastime of
dissecting the miscues, assigning blame, and yes, doing a little bit of
grave-dancing.
When it comes to Bush's two-year decline, the press has remained oddly
detached. By contrast, the recent coverage of Clinton has been dripping with
emotion; with disdain and contempt that bordered on vitriol.
Bush literally drives the country into a ditch while erecting new standards
for secrecy and incompetence (Iraq [6], Abu Ghraib [7], Walter Reed Hospital
[8], Hurricane Katrina [9], staggering national debt [10], etc.), and the
press yawns. But Clinton makes ill-advised and insensitive [11] unscripted
comments on the campaign trail, and that's what really gets the Beltway
press upset -- enrages them, really, as they scramble to find just the right
adjective to describe Clinton's allegedly deceitful, abhorrent behavior.
Am I the only one struck by the disconnect here?
I'm not suggesting Clinton is immune from criticism or that he didn't screw
up. His comments obviously upset many people who in the past supported him
politically. But it sure would have been nice, over the previous eight
years, if the same press corps that today has trouble controlling its
roiling contempt for Clinton would just once or twice flash the same passion
and anger towards Bush for what he's done in the White House and what he's
done to this country.
Not only won't the press get angry about Bush, the press won't even dwell on
the topic. The recent State of the Union would have been the perfect
opportunity for journalists to put Bush's sad legacy in context, to document
the extraordinary political and public opinion failure that his presidency
has become, and the deep, lasting damage he has done to the Republican
Party, which is viewed dismally by the public and now faces an epidemic [12]
of congressional retirements. The traditional press, however, has little
interest in focusing on the unpleasantness.
In a sense, we're witnessing the logical conclusion to the media's lapdog
[13] approach to covering Bush. When the president was flying high during
the glory years of 2002-2005, the press eagerly played the role of
star-maker, while walking away from its traditional oversight duties. But
when the Bush presidency collapsed and the American people abandoned the
administration, the press quietly turned away, not wanting to dwell on the
unpleasantness.
One of the likely reasons for that is that the press understands its own,
almost monumental failure [14] in covering this presidency, especially
during the defining moment -- the run-up to the war in Iraq. And remember,
this is the same political press corps that had a gut feeling about Bush in
2000; just liked the guy. They vouched for him. Said he was a real,
authentic politician who would restore bipartisanship to Washington again.
So, today, journalists aren't interested in dissecting what went wrong with
Bush because then journalists would have to dissect what they did wrong, and
that's not where they want the spotlight to be. I think there's a collective
embarrassment -- a collective shame -- within the industry for being de
facto sponsors of the Bush fiasco in the first place. After all, the Beltway
press prides itself on being able to spot a winner.
And that's why the press tried for so long to buck Bush up during his slide.
Last year, right about the time that Gallup announced Bush's approval
ratings had dropped to a new low of just 29 percent, which ranked "in the
bottom 3% of more than 1,300 Gallup presidential approval ratings since
1938" (ouch!), The Washington Post published [15] a long, Page One mash note
about how, despite his travails, Bush remained steadfast in his beliefs:
At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One
at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians,
philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature
of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have
for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what
we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it
just me they hate?
These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic
political collapse in a generation. Not generally known for intellectual
curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical
exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his
administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely
expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off
course.
Good grief.
For most of the last year, round after round of dismal poll ratings [16] for
Bush have been met with a sort of quiet resign among the press corps.
Context has been sorely lacking.
For instance, in the last half-century, the only other second-term collapse
that compares to Bush's belongs to Richard Nixon, whose fall was fueled by
the revelation that a criminal enterprise had been operating from inside the
Oval Office. Yet Bush's second-term performance is rarely mentioned in the
same breath as Nixon's. And there's virtually no mention of the fact that
Bush is currently running between 20 and 30 points behind where his
predecessor was during his final year in office.
In fact, some are still passing along the tired White House spin that Bush's
public approval rebound is just around the corner. (All the way up to 45
percent!) From [17] U.S. News & World Report, January 10:
George W. Bush and some congressional backers see happy days for the prez
this year. His fans have dubbed it his "legacy year," when they hope to lock
in his achievements on the domestic front.
Good luck with that.
Compare that to the eager newsroom crowds who used to gather around fresh
polling data back in 1998 and 1999 as journalists parsed the latest results
[18] in search of the slightest dip in public support for Clinton that would
finally confirm the media's long-held belief that the public would
eventually turn on Clinton, especially during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
And think back to the 2000 presidential campaign. Did a single day pass when
a reporter or pundit did not ask out loud what effect Clinton's legacy would
have on the Democratic candidate for president? The laundry list of unknowns
was endless: Was Clinton hogging the spotlight? Was he doing enough for Vice
President Al Gore's campaign? Was Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign
siphoning off Gore's campaign donations? Would voters punish Gore for
impeachment?
By contrast, in 2008, Bush does not exist as a political story. Instead,
he's been politely assigned the role of a non-entity for the upcoming White
House race. But why?
Despite an avalanche of campaign coverage produced, so far I have not seen
any media speculation about how the GOP is going to handle the opening night
of its nominating convention this summer when the party will almost
certainly have to feature Bush and allow him to give a prime-time speech to
the nation. Politically, that is going to be a disaster for Republicans as
they try desperately, in front of a national television audience, to turn
the page on Bush's tenure of failure. For the somnambulant press though,
none of that is of any interest.
Two recently published Beltway essays perfectly captured the media's
schizophrenic and patently dishonest approach to covering Bush and Clinton.
The first was by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, who wrote a January 28 op-ed
[19] for The New York Times. Weisberg looked back at Bush's first State of
the Union address and its "compassionate conservative" theme and noted how
Bush "intended to marry the liberal desire for more federal money to the
conservative demand for higher standards."
Weisberg assured readers that "Mr. Bush seemed genuinely to want to be the
kind of president indicated by that first address."
Of course, none of that came to be. The "compassionate conservative" routine
turned out to be mostly empty rhetoric. Why? According to Weisberg's
friendly interpretation, it was because Bush "was too distracted by war and
foreign policy, and too bored by the processes of government to know if the
people working for him were following through on his proposals."
See, Bush is not duplicitous or immoral. And nothing he has done in office
would cause a CW scout like Weisberg to get angry or level charges about
Bush's character. The president simply became misguided and lost interest.
What's the big fuss, people? That's what presidents sometimes do -- they
fail miserably and cause all sorts of pain and discomfort for millions of
citizens. That's no reason to get excited.
But go out on the campaign trail these days as a Democratic ex-president and
be charged with taking an opponent's comments out of context? Now that's
reason for reporters to raise holy hell. That's why the pundits could barely
keep their laptops steady -- their rage at Clinton was building so rapidly
inside them. Clinton was guilty of "lying and cheating," of being "glaringly
dishonest," and promoting an "idiotic, lowest-common-denominator political
discourse." And that was just from one recent washingtonpost.com column
[20].
According to Newsweek [21], Clinton's campaign attacks "insult[ed] voters'
intelligence." Struck by that harsh rhetoric, I did a search of Nexis to see
if during Bush's entire tenure Newsweek had ever claimed that any of the
misinformation that routinely flowed from the Bush White House (WMD's, for
instance) had "insulted the intelligence" of Americans. I could not find a
single Newsweek example.
The other recent essay that (inadvertently) highlighted the media's
Bush/Clinton double standard came from John Harris at the Politico, who
wrote [22]
about how the "liberal establishment" was abandoning the Clintons. (The only
actual "liberal" referenced in the long piece was Sen. Ted Kennedy, but
who's counting?) Harris was struck by the contemptuous, inside-the-Beltway
vibe he was picking up about Bill Clinton:
From Washington's perspective, to judge by the most common criticism heard
over the years and again in recent days, the problem is not that Bill
Clinton is Bubba but that he is Eddie Haskell -- smug, smarmy,
self-absorbed.
Bush has been on the national political scene for nearly a decade, and I
doubt I have ever read a mainstream reporter so flippantly pass along
anonymous insults about Bush's character the way Harris did regarding
Clinton. Of course, Harris did it with ease -- and nobody flinched --
because that's how the press has treated Clinton for years, even when he was
in office; no insult or personal dig was considered off limits by the press.
(Blogger Atrios once dubbed [23] it the "Clinton Rules of Journalism," i.e.
anything goes.)
For the media, it's simple: The suggestion that Bill Clinton has an
oversized ego is far more upsetting and newsworthy than George Bush's proven
track record of incompetence.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Eric Boehlert
Created Feb 5 2008 - 2:34pm
Two presidents made headlines last week: The current one, for delivering [1]
his final State of the Union Address, and the former one, for making miscues
on the campaign trail.
Which was deemed more newsworthy? For the press, the choice was obvious:
Bill Clinton garnered an extraordinary amount of press attention -- more so,
in fact, than any of the Republican candidates running for president,
according to one news survey [2].
That simply highlights the media's over-the-top [3] obsession with Clinton.
What really struck me was the difference in tone from the recent Bush and
Clinton coverage. The sitting president was delivering his final State of
the Union, capping off his failed presidency, which has provoked [4] deep
despair among most Americans [5] about the future of the country. And for
that, Bush has been tagged the most consistently unpopular president in
modern history.
Yet the reaction from the press and pundits last week when marking the final
chapter of the Bush decline was mostly to shrug their shoulders and look
away. The media has, throughout Bush's gruesome political collapse, shown
very little interest in taking part in the usual Beltway pastime of
dissecting the miscues, assigning blame, and yes, doing a little bit of
grave-dancing.
When it comes to Bush's two-year decline, the press has remained oddly
detached. By contrast, the recent coverage of Clinton has been dripping with
emotion; with disdain and contempt that bordered on vitriol.
Bush literally drives the country into a ditch while erecting new standards
for secrecy and incompetence (Iraq [6], Abu Ghraib [7], Walter Reed Hospital
[8], Hurricane Katrina [9], staggering national debt [10], etc.), and the
press yawns. But Clinton makes ill-advised and insensitive [11] unscripted
comments on the campaign trail, and that's what really gets the Beltway
press upset -- enrages them, really, as they scramble to find just the right
adjective to describe Clinton's allegedly deceitful, abhorrent behavior.
Am I the only one struck by the disconnect here?
I'm not suggesting Clinton is immune from criticism or that he didn't screw
up. His comments obviously upset many people who in the past supported him
politically. But it sure would have been nice, over the previous eight
years, if the same press corps that today has trouble controlling its
roiling contempt for Clinton would just once or twice flash the same passion
and anger towards Bush for what he's done in the White House and what he's
done to this country.
Not only won't the press get angry about Bush, the press won't even dwell on
the topic. The recent State of the Union would have been the perfect
opportunity for journalists to put Bush's sad legacy in context, to document
the extraordinary political and public opinion failure that his presidency
has become, and the deep, lasting damage he has done to the Republican
Party, which is viewed dismally by the public and now faces an epidemic [12]
of congressional retirements. The traditional press, however, has little
interest in focusing on the unpleasantness.
In a sense, we're witnessing the logical conclusion to the media's lapdog
[13] approach to covering Bush. When the president was flying high during
the glory years of 2002-2005, the press eagerly played the role of
star-maker, while walking away from its traditional oversight duties. But
when the Bush presidency collapsed and the American people abandoned the
administration, the press quietly turned away, not wanting to dwell on the
unpleasantness.
One of the likely reasons for that is that the press understands its own,
almost monumental failure [14] in covering this presidency, especially
during the defining moment -- the run-up to the war in Iraq. And remember,
this is the same political press corps that had a gut feeling about Bush in
2000; just liked the guy. They vouched for him. Said he was a real,
authentic politician who would restore bipartisanship to Washington again.
So, today, journalists aren't interested in dissecting what went wrong with
Bush because then journalists would have to dissect what they did wrong, and
that's not where they want the spotlight to be. I think there's a collective
embarrassment -- a collective shame -- within the industry for being de
facto sponsors of the Bush fiasco in the first place. After all, the Beltway
press prides itself on being able to spot a winner.
And that's why the press tried for so long to buck Bush up during his slide.
Last year, right about the time that Gallup announced Bush's approval
ratings had dropped to a new low of just 29 percent, which ranked "in the
bottom 3% of more than 1,300 Gallup presidential approval ratings since
1938" (ouch!), The Washington Post published [15] a long, Page One mash note
about how, despite his travails, Bush remained steadfast in his beliefs:
At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One
at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians,
philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature
of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have
for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what
we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it
just me they hate?
These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic
political collapse in a generation. Not generally known for intellectual
curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical
exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his
administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely
expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off
course.
Good grief.
For most of the last year, round after round of dismal poll ratings [16] for
Bush have been met with a sort of quiet resign among the press corps.
Context has been sorely lacking.
For instance, in the last half-century, the only other second-term collapse
that compares to Bush's belongs to Richard Nixon, whose fall was fueled by
the revelation that a criminal enterprise had been operating from inside the
Oval Office. Yet Bush's second-term performance is rarely mentioned in the
same breath as Nixon's. And there's virtually no mention of the fact that
Bush is currently running between 20 and 30 points behind where his
predecessor was during his final year in office.
In fact, some are still passing along the tired White House spin that Bush's
public approval rebound is just around the corner. (All the way up to 45
percent!) From [17] U.S. News & World Report, January 10:
George W. Bush and some congressional backers see happy days for the prez
this year. His fans have dubbed it his "legacy year," when they hope to lock
in his achievements on the domestic front.
Good luck with that.
Compare that to the eager newsroom crowds who used to gather around fresh
polling data back in 1998 and 1999 as journalists parsed the latest results
[18] in search of the slightest dip in public support for Clinton that would
finally confirm the media's long-held belief that the public would
eventually turn on Clinton, especially during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
And think back to the 2000 presidential campaign. Did a single day pass when
a reporter or pundit did not ask out loud what effect Clinton's legacy would
have on the Democratic candidate for president? The laundry list of unknowns
was endless: Was Clinton hogging the spotlight? Was he doing enough for Vice
President Al Gore's campaign? Was Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign
siphoning off Gore's campaign donations? Would voters punish Gore for
impeachment?
By contrast, in 2008, Bush does not exist as a political story. Instead,
he's been politely assigned the role of a non-entity for the upcoming White
House race. But why?
Despite an avalanche of campaign coverage produced, so far I have not seen
any media speculation about how the GOP is going to handle the opening night
of its nominating convention this summer when the party will almost
certainly have to feature Bush and allow him to give a prime-time speech to
the nation. Politically, that is going to be a disaster for Republicans as
they try desperately, in front of a national television audience, to turn
the page on Bush's tenure of failure. For the somnambulant press though,
none of that is of any interest.
Two recently published Beltway essays perfectly captured the media's
schizophrenic and patently dishonest approach to covering Bush and Clinton.
The first was by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, who wrote a January 28 op-ed
[19] for The New York Times. Weisberg looked back at Bush's first State of
the Union address and its "compassionate conservative" theme and noted how
Bush "intended to marry the liberal desire for more federal money to the
conservative demand for higher standards."
Weisberg assured readers that "Mr. Bush seemed genuinely to want to be the
kind of president indicated by that first address."
Of course, none of that came to be. The "compassionate conservative" routine
turned out to be mostly empty rhetoric. Why? According to Weisberg's
friendly interpretation, it was because Bush "was too distracted by war and
foreign policy, and too bored by the processes of government to know if the
people working for him were following through on his proposals."
See, Bush is not duplicitous or immoral. And nothing he has done in office
would cause a CW scout like Weisberg to get angry or level charges about
Bush's character. The president simply became misguided and lost interest.
What's the big fuss, people? That's what presidents sometimes do -- they
fail miserably and cause all sorts of pain and discomfort for millions of
citizens. That's no reason to get excited.
But go out on the campaign trail these days as a Democratic ex-president and
be charged with taking an opponent's comments out of context? Now that's
reason for reporters to raise holy hell. That's why the pundits could barely
keep their laptops steady -- their rage at Clinton was building so rapidly
inside them. Clinton was guilty of "lying and cheating," of being "glaringly
dishonest," and promoting an "idiotic, lowest-common-denominator political
discourse." And that was just from one recent washingtonpost.com column
[20].
According to Newsweek [21], Clinton's campaign attacks "insult[ed] voters'
intelligence." Struck by that harsh rhetoric, I did a search of Nexis to see
if during Bush's entire tenure Newsweek had ever claimed that any of the
misinformation that routinely flowed from the Bush White House (WMD's, for
instance) had "insulted the intelligence" of Americans. I could not find a
single Newsweek example.
The other recent essay that (inadvertently) highlighted the media's
Bush/Clinton double standard came from John Harris at the Politico, who
wrote [22]
about how the "liberal establishment" was abandoning the Clintons. (The only
actual "liberal" referenced in the long piece was Sen. Ted Kennedy, but
who's counting?) Harris was struck by the contemptuous, inside-the-Beltway
vibe he was picking up about Bill Clinton:
From Washington's perspective, to judge by the most common criticism heard
over the years and again in recent days, the problem is not that Bill
Clinton is Bubba but that he is Eddie Haskell -- smug, smarmy,
self-absorbed.
Bush has been on the national political scene for nearly a decade, and I
doubt I have ever read a mainstream reporter so flippantly pass along
anonymous insults about Bush's character the way Harris did regarding
Clinton. Of course, Harris did it with ease -- and nobody flinched --
because that's how the press has treated Clinton for years, even when he was
in office; no insult or personal dig was considered off limits by the press.
(Blogger Atrios once dubbed [23] it the "Clinton Rules of Journalism," i.e.
anything goes.)
For the media, it's simple: The suggestion that Bill Clinton has an
oversized ego is far more upsetting and newsworthy than George Bush's proven
track record of incompetence.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson