The Media Loves Obama and Hates Clinton, They Both Earned It

For those of you who are not frequent readers of the Seattle PI, I’d like to introduce you to the world’s most brilliant editorial cartoonist: David Horsey.

Horsey recently launched a blog to go along with his cartoons, and his post from a few days ago entitled “Hillary’s Kool-Aid drinkers” caught my attention. In it, Horsey quotes Frank Rich’s devastating analysis of the Clinton campaign from Sunday’s New York Times:

In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

Horsey comments:

During the primary season, supporters of Hillary Clinton have been especially contemptuous of Barack Obama’s adoring acolytes, seeing them as callow, unrealistic, swooning youngsters seduced by the man’s smooth tongue and cool style…

However, it can be argued that Hillary’s followers have been the ones with stars in their eyes…

The Obama campaign has been relentless, incredibly well organized and far more politically hard-headed than the Clinton operation… If Obama can run the country like he has run his campaign, worries about his lack of experience may be groundless.

The Clinton campaign would have you believe that all this apt analysis is just another example of a fawning and starstruck media “offering Senator Obama another pillow:”

And indeed, Senator Clinton has made no secret of her contempt for the intelligence of those who are impressed with the lanky Illinois Senator’s optimism. Here she is at a rally in Rhode Island:

With her outburst during Tuesday’s debate, Senator Clinton has added the nation’s media to the growing list of intelligent, thoughtful groups of people who she says have obviously been duped and taken in by a smooth talking, inexperienced, and unqualified kid.

Now, I won’t dispute for a minute that the media tends to prefer Obama to Clinton these days. Even Horsey aptly lampoons the preference in his most recent cartoon:

But insofar as the bias exists, it’s for a good reason.

Journalists are not generally capricious people. Newspaper owners may sometimes be, but journalism requires a certain thoughtfulness, fair-mindedness, and adherence to ethics. Yes, there have been dishonest reporters. But all in all, the members of our national news media are clever people. What’s more, they’ve given Senator Clinton more than a fair shake. After all, she was treated as the inevitable nominee for a very long time.

No, the media was most definitely Clinton’s to lose. And lose them she did, through her own incompetent and overconfident campaigning. Rich is very insightful when he writes that the downfall of Clinton’s campaign has “uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.”

Meanwhile, Senator Obama has had to work very hard to earn the respect of the nation and the media. And as Senator Clinton has said so many times, it’s all about working hard.