“It was just one of those things” — the media, JFK and Obama
The MSM have a wild and mad crush on someone (photo via Reuters). “It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings, just one of those things.” Newsweek:
Inside Obama’s Dream Machine — An icon of hope, he won’t ‘kneecap’ his foes. But Obama knows what it takes, and how to win…
In public, Obama attributes his quick political rise to that “respectful tone,” which he believes voters crave after so many ugly, dispiriting campaign seasons. (Which includes most races since 1800.) When he first began thinking about a White House bid, he told advisers that he would be willing to run only if he could do it his way, which meant defying the conventional campaign theology of hitting the other guy hard…
along the way, he has had to resist continual pressure even from inside his own campaign to take a harder and harsher line against his rivals, Hillary Clinton in particular. On the bus the night before the Iowa caucuses, Obama recounted one difficult episode. Early in the campaign, he lectured his staff that he wasn’t going to tolerate any bashing of his rivals—no slipping anonymous snarky quotes to reporters, no feeding nasty gossip to bloggers. (Of course, Obama staffers, like all campaign aides, can’t resist swapping choice bits of gossip with eager reporters.) But last summer Obama’s campaign was stalling after a series of lackluster debate performances. His staff pleaded with him to go after Clinton. Then, a sleazy anonymous oppo-research memo, sourced to the Obama campaign, started making the rounds among reporters. It suggested Bill Clinton had profited from companies that outsourced jobs to India, while Hillary raked in donations from Indian-Americans. The memo was crudely titled “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).”
The Clinton campaign was justifiably angry, and seized on the episode as proof that Obama had abandoned his vaunted “politics of hope” and had offended Indian-Americans in the process. Obama was furious with his staff. “Some of my roommates in college were Indian and Pakistani,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I had to call some of my best friends and explain that my campaign wasn’t engaged in xenophobia.” Obama held a come-to-Jesus meeting with his senior aides at his Chicago headquarters and vented his anger. “If you’re even going close to the line, you better ask me first,” he recalled saying. “That was the most angry I’ve been in this campaign.”
Obama’s high-minded themes of hope and change—and not getting your hands dirty—can come off as earnest, even naive, in the world of hardball presidential politics. But Obama is also a streetwise Chicago pol…The campaign he wants you to see is not about Red America or Blue America, but Obama’s America. The soundtrack at his campaign events includes ’60s soul (Aretha Franklin’s “Think”), the ’70s Philly sound (the O’Jays’ “Give the People What They Want”) and, in a sly nod to the other side, even a little country (Brooks and Dunn’s “Only in America”—which was the theme song of Bush/Cheney ‘04). At a high-school rally in Des Moines, he brought his field organizers onstage to take a bow. The group included whites and blacks, Asians and Latinos. “It’s a good-looking bunch,” he said. “They’re like a Benetton ad.”
It’s a compelling theme, and it doesn’t hurt that Obama, tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it. It also doesn’t hurt that he is married to Michelle Obama, a dynamic, ambitious Princeton and Harvard Law grad who is her husband’s intellectual equal, and often a better pitch-person than the candidate himself.
Goodness gracious, what a puff piece. We can understand why President Clinton is furious. Unfortunately for Bill Clinton, Obama is the fortuitous beneficiary of a media that clearly dislike Hillary Clinton (sometimes viscerally), and only now see the opportunity to express that disdain. To get a little perspective on the current Obama haigiography, let’s take a look at a puff piece on another candidate, called “He has a habit of victory,” from the July 13, 1960 New York Times:
The New York Times may perhaps be excused for its almost entirely uncritical profile of Kennedy. After all, it came after he had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination, not immediately before the New Hampshire primary. As for Newsweek, its ardor over Obama at the moment looks to us to be “too hot not to cool down.” But we’ll just have to wait and see.