I think Garance and Ezra are quite right; the [tag]media[/tag]’s coverage of [tag]Barack Obama[/tag] has taken a noticeably hostile turn. News accounts were less than kind from the weekend forum on health care policy, when Obama steered clear of specifics, citing the fact that his campaign is “only eight weeks old.” Today, The Politico’s Mike Allen skewers the senator for alleged “rookie mistakes.” Over the weekend, Ron Brownstein questioned the limits of Obama’s appeal. The AP has a surprisingly antagonistic article this morning asking whether Obama is “all style and little substance.”
Some of this is fair and, to the disappointment of Obama’s ardent fans, inevitable. As Garance explained well, we’re seeing a second-phase unfold. After the initial “get to know you” coverage, more intense scrutiny and skepticism kicks in. It’s unlikely Obama is surprised by any of this; he’s alluded publicly to this being unavoidabe, if not healthy.
But Richard Cohen seems to have picked up on this trend in an unusually silly way.
I tell you this story to suggest something about Barack Obama. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” [Obama] recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.
“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.” The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.
Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness.
There’s thorough scrutiny on an autobiography, and then there’s pettiness. This appears to fall into the latter.
I kept waiting for Cohen to acknowledge that a grown man’s memory of an article he saw at age 9 is hardly a reliable indicator for veracity. Instead, Cohen makes the opposite argument — that Obama’s three-decade-old confused memory raises questions about the senator’s integrity. He calls this mistaken anecdote “a warning flag.”
When the Tribune told Obama that Life magazine historians could find no such story, Obama suggested it might have been Ebony — “or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?” (The Tribune says Ebony’s archivists also could not come up with such an article.) Indeed, the memory of the event/non-event is so firmly planted in Obama’s mind that it seems to have become an emotional truth for him, far more powerful than an intellectual truth. […]
In Obama’s case … there might be something more than foggy memory at work. He may be manipulating the facts in order to wrap raw ambition in the gauze of a larger cause…. This tendency to manipulate facts may bear watching in Obama. (After all, we hardly know him.)
Glenn Greenwald thinks we’ve seen this movie before.
Cohen, even while praising Obama, starts infecting the public discourse with the type of slippery, odorous innuendo about his character which lingers and can never really be disproven. With almost a full year before the first primary vote, Obama has already, in essence, claimed to have invented the Internet, to be the source of inspiration for Love Story, and to have been in Cambodia during Christmas.
For that matter, Kevin Drum is keeping track of media “dimwittery” when it comes to high-profile Democrats.
* Nancy Pelosi: the military jet flap
* John Edwards: the Georgetown house flap, the foul-mouthed blogger flap
* Barack Obama: the madrassa flap, the stock purchase flap
* Hillary Clinton: the “evil and bad men” flap, the family foundation flap, the “Southern drawl” flap
Looks like we can add another to the list.