THE LOW POST: The Return of Evil Campaign Journalism

In the Nagourney piece, we're getting some glimpses of where the adjectival battleground might be in the upcoming race:

[Obama] is cerebral and easy-going, often talking over any applause that might rise up from his audience, and perhaps consciously trying to present a political style that contrasts with the more charged presences of John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and senator from North Carolina, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Nagourney then went on to make a prolonged case for Obama's "easygoingness," quoting a from-central-casting Iowan farmer ("He's low key, he speaks like a professor") and that similarly ubiquitous figure of campaign coverage, the earnest schoolteacher-voter ("Dazzle is not what he's about at all. He's peaceful").

In paragraph 12, Nagourney asks Obama about his easygoing persona theory. Obama confirms it, saying "I want to give them a sense of my thought process."

So by paragraph 13 -- the next paragraph -- we officially have an "emerging style of Mr. Obama as a candidate for president," one that stands in stark contrast to his fiery speech at the '04 convention. Nagourney is officially pronouncing Obama "easygoing" here, and he appears to do so approvingly, implying distantly that the "charged" emotionalism of Obama's '04 speech might be unsettling or unappealing to voters.

You will see this a lot in campaign journalism, where a candidate who gives journalists reason to paint him with emotional adjectives like "heated" or "angry" or "passionate" will be subtly fragged in places like the Times -- as though his "emotion" was evidence of a subterranean streak of dangerous Trotskyism (for Dems) or Hitlerism (for Republicans). Expect John McCain to have a lot of trouble in that area next summer.

Obama's "easygoing" is okay -- theoretically. But it's not the whole story, says Nagourney. He goes on to add that Obama also shows "strains of the populist call of Ross Perot" -- this is seemingly in negative contrast to Obama's easygoingness. (Absurdly, Nagourney's example of a "populist call" is the line "[let's] take our country back," which has been used by every hack/corporate-sponsored presidential candidate for the last thirty years). But then, even worse than the "populist strain" comes this passage:

But there is also, in a historical comparison that his supporters have tended to resist, the cool intellectualism of Adlai Stevenson who, for all the loyalty he inspired among many Democrats in the 1950s...lost two presidential elections. If Mr. Obama enters the room to the sounds of "Think" by Aretha Franklin and the roar of people coming to their feet, clapping and jostling for photographs, it is only moments before the atmosphere turns from campaign rally to college seminar...

You could almost smell this one coming. As surely as there is a nutty neighbor in every sitcom, there is an "Adlai Stevenson" in every Democratic primary race. Sometimes the comparison is made overtly, as in the case of the 2000 race, when Newsweek baldly resurrected the famous "worn-out shoe" photo of a campaigning Stevenson, using Bill Bradley, the most Stevensonesque of the new Stevensons, as the stand-in. Ironically, the man Bradley lost to in that primary season, Al Gore, would himself be Stevensoned in the general election, haunted in his neck-and-neck race with George Bush by accusations of braininess, collegiate diction and defiant, loserish idealism.