‘You guys have got to get it off your minds’

August 23, 2007

I find it rather bizarre that this is not only on the national AP wire, but is listed among the top political wire stories of the day.

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Wednesday his wife was not taking a swipe at Hillary Rodham Clinton when she said, “If you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.”

The remarks “were not about Hillary Clinton,” Obama told The Associated Press as he left a campaign rally in New York. […]

“She has been making that speech constantly about the decision we made to make sure that our family was strong,” Obama said, “because if our family wasn’t that strong then we couldn’t be a strong leader in the White House.”

“The whole thing about Hillary has been completely fabricated,” Obama added. “You guys have got to get it off your minds.”

I know it’s August, but the news cycle isn’t this slow. There’s no way political reporters could seriously perceive this as an important campaign development.

And yet here we are.

We went over this on Tuesday, so I won’t rehash the substance (or lack thereof) of this all over again, but I would like to point out two comments from the last thread that raise a point political reporters might want to keep in mind.

Anne said:

Interesting that the media didn’t make the assumption that she was taking a swipe at, say, Rudy Cheated-on-every-woman-he’s-been married-to-whose-children-hardly-speak-to-him Giuliani, or John “Cheater” McCain, or the twice-married Fred “Ladies Man” Thompson, don’t you think? Why Hillary?

Zeitgeist was on the same page:

I think it interesting that anyone assumed — even if you thought Michelle Obama was attacking another candidate — that the target was Hillary Clinton. HRC can’t run her own house? Last I knew she was on her first marriage and her daughter seems both well adjusted and seems to care deeply about and support her parents. Unlike, oh, Giuliani (who has it all – thrice married and his kids are endorsing Democrats), McCain, Gingrich, or most of the Bush family whose kids all seem to have had brushes with the law.

By any reasonable interpretation, Michelle Obama’s comments had absolutely nothing to do with any other candidate, but if the media is so anxious to read something into her remarks, there are some candidates on the other side of the aisle who have had some fairly obvious family trouble.

They write what they’re told to by the people who sign their paychecks. This is no isolated incident but only one of hundreds going back years already. Given that they aren’t even pretending to do similar stories about the other side, there is no other viable conclusion possible.

And I’ll keep on saying it until these alleged journalists prove me wrong by not writing this kind of fratboy trash any more.

  • Curmudgeon’s right. This won’t change until there are proven to be some consequences for this kind of celebrity-gossip style “coverage.”

    It almost makes me think Fred Thompson’s notion (really, Al Gore’s notion, but he’s not making the attempt) of trying to go directly to voters rather than through the MSM filter is the right idea, even if TV’s Fred is mostly using it to avoid scrutiny rather than talk issues.

  • I think this goes back to what Obama and Jon Stewart were talking about last night, when Stewart talked about how media narratives make information easily categorized and reported and sell papers, even if they’re woefully inaccurate.

    Intentionally or not, the Obamas have revived a favorite media narrative of the 90’s, which is the right-wing attacks on the Clintons on family values. Now, no matter what the context or substance, whenever Obama tries to make his family values pitch (and it is an important one for him, seeing as how he’s trying to woo moderate Republican and independent Christian voters, especially rural ones), there’s going to be an over-arching media narrative about how that stands in stark contrast to the Clintons, and maybe its a veiled swipe at Hillary, etc etc etc.

    Jon Stewart: Do you feel like you’re stuck in a narrative now, and the narrative is: ‘Hillary Clinton is unlikable, but knows what she’s doing. Obama is inexperienced, but brings change’? And that narrative — no matter what you do, because it’s easily categorized — the media, or everyone else, will just slip whatever happens into those two narratives?

    Sen. Obama: That’s what’s happening right now. They will probably find something new, later, to talk about. The whole —

    Stewart: Could you tell us what that will BE?

    Obama: We don’t know yet. Whatever sells papers.

    Stewart: Whatever sells papers.

    Obama: Whatever sells papers.

    Slamming Hillary and Bill for Bill’s philandering is a tried and true narrative for selling papers, so it shouldn’t be really a surprise to see the media revive it.

    No?

  • I think mop at 3 has it half covered, that the media will hear “controversy involving the Clintons!” every time it can, even if it is a reach. What the right fails to fully grasp is that part of why the Clintons sell so much copy is because a lot of people passionate like them. Hence Bill’s 60+ % approval ratings at the end of his term despite having gone through the impeachment.

    But the other half, I fear, is that the media is setting Michelle Obama up to be the next Hillary — the too ambitious, too aggressive, too contemporary, too liberated, too outspoken political wife or First Lady. If you set up a continuum with Laura Bush on one end and HRC on the other, Michelle Obama seems closer to the HRC end to me. And for me, that is a compliment, but for a lot of Republicans, older generations, midwestern and southerners and traditionalists of all stripes, that is not a compliment. They want their First Ladies to stand there all Nancy Reagan like and look adoringly at the President (although without the new china and the astrologers).

    In otherwords, the primary message is “ooh! Clinton controvery! remember they have marital problems!” The secondary message is “catfight! woo-hoo, everyone loves a catfight!” But the teritary message may well be “wow, that Michelle Obama is kinda catty, dontcha think? She’s not exactly a warm, matronly type. I bet she doesn’t bake homemade cookies.”

  • “I bet she doesn’t bake homemade cookies.”

    no, but she tucks her kids into bed every night. a lot of the more “traditional” first ladies didn’t do that.

  • It’s easier than ever to see the similarities in the way Bush says things that aren’t true, and keeps saying them until enough people believe them, and the media latches onto a meme and refuses to let go.

    In some ways, the news side of the print media is increasingly just a gigantic op-ed section, riddled as it is with either only one side of the story, or the facts packaged to produce a desired conclusion. The TV news is no different. Kelly O’Donnell this morning on NBC “reported” on Bush’s speech and the new campaign to sell the president’s policy, and nowhere did she weigh in with the inaccuracies in the Iraq = Vietnam speech, nor did she question the use of veterans to sell the occupation. Missing was any counterpoint, which allowed her “report” to stand as unquestioned fact. Had Matt Lauer introduced her report by saying, “And now, here’s Kelly O’Donnell to give us our morning segment of administration propaganda” it would have been a more accurate assessment of what was to follow.

    Everybody wants to be a star, to make the 7-figure income, to make the rounds of the talk shows and write books and be “pundits,” and neither they, or their agents nor the corporations which employ them care whether truth is a casualty in their quest for glory and the almighty dollar.

    Obama and Clinton and Edwards have been on defense already, and that’s where they will stay if they don’t push back hard enough to hurt.

  • Give me a thinking and independent Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Edwards and yes, even Hillary Clinton, over that glazed-over Stepford creature that is Laura Bush.

  • Did anyone cathc Hardball last night? (Thankfully Tweety wasn’t there.) They had some idiot Right Wing hack on who mannaged to pluck his anti-Clinton book in every other sentence. When the other guest proved that Michelle Obama was NOT talking about the Clintons by reading the sentence that followed Michelle Obama’s alledged swipe at Hilary (something the host neglected to show, of course), the hack just kept going on and on that it didn’t matter whether Michelle Obama was taking a swipe at Hillary or not. What mattered was that Bill Clinton has fooled around and Hillary has “enabled” him in his “promiscuity”. What Micelle Obama had said or meant was an irrelevancy. The only important thing was to attack the Clintons.

    The Right Wing has never forgiven Hillary for standing by Bill during the Lewinski mess. They wanted her to pump that whole thing up further by the spectacle of the First Lady storming out og the White House and filing for divorce.

  • Zeitgest–very good point, an angle I hadn’t considered, but rings true to me. Its reviving an old narrative and trying to push Michelle Obama into an Elizabeth Edwards-type narrative, I think.

  • MW–yeah, I read the transcript for Hardball, pretty crazy. The right-wing hack basically made the point I was trying to make above explicitly: he said, in effect, that Michelle Obama’s intentions didn’t matter, because her comments gave them a jumping off point for discussion about the Clintons’ marital issues, and those issues are important, and as such we should be discussing them.

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