THE LOW POST: The Return of Evil Campaign Journalism

Generally speaking, the "Adlai Stevenson" tag -- which also sometimes appears in the guise of phrases like "speaks like a college professor" and "has a bookish, intellectual demeanor" -- is 100 percent fatal in a presidential season. It is the AIDS virus of presidential campaign adjectives, even deadlier than "moribund" or "prickly." The only politician to survive it beyond the normal diagnostic time-frame is Jimmy Carter, who was killed by it four years later than usual, but even he would have been felled earlier had it not been for Watergate.

The rest of the Nagourney piece was full of inane descriptions of the Obama "style": he is described as being a "tactile campaigner, his bony hand grabbing elbows and hands," he "speaks in a language of community and shared sacrifice...evocative of Mario Cuomo," he "talks in even, measured tones," and his audiences are "rapt, if sometimes a tad restless; long periods can go by when there is not a rustle in the crowd."

If you're thinking Um, okay, that's all great, but what the fuck does the candidate stand for?, you're not the only one. For all the tireless descriptions of Obama's "style" that there were in the piece, there was absolutely nothing in it about Obama's platform, not one thing. Which is kind of an amazing accomplishment, considering that this was a front-page political profile in the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

But this is the way campaign journalism goes. You'll hear quite a lot in the next 20 months about who has bony hands, who has lines on his or her face, who looks good in a parka, who can play the saxophone underwater, who is "measured" and who is "fiery" -- but you won't hear anything about who voted for the bankruptcy bill and who didn't (Obama was a nay, incidentally; Hillary abstained).

This technique isn't confined to the Times, not by any stretch of the imagination. A huge chunk of the rest of the campaign coverage we've seen to date has been of the same ilk, with mostly all of the coverage involving either poll numbers, money-raising stats, scandals or "style." In the New York Post's recent campaign against Hillary -- the newspaper is humorously running an openly poisonous series of articles lauding Democratic voters who have switched from Hill to Obama -- almost all of the info has been about Hill's money troubles and pleasingly vague testimonials from voters like the following, from a black doorman named Gregory Smith:

"Hillary, in my eyes, is a professional politician...that's why I like Barack. He's more believable than Hillary. Barack chose politics to better people."

Again, this issue of who is or who isn't a "professional politician," who's more "believable" -- this is all right up the alley of campaign journalism. If you're not rolling on the ground laughing at the idea of the New York Post arbitrating, with a straight face, the issue of someone's "believability," you should probably be institutionalized. But this kind of stuff is there for a reason. Spend enough time on "believability" and you don't have to worry about who took money from the maker of the "Plan B" morning-after pill and then held up the nomination of the FDA commissioner until he cleared over-the-counter status for the drug (that'd be Hillary Clinton, carrying water for Barr laboratories), or which two putatively antagonistic Democratic candidates are having their economic platform crafted by the same Wall Street-friendly roundtable (that'd be Hillary and Obama, both turning their platforms over to the Hamilton Project, a free-trade group associated with the Brookings Institution). I mean, senators are pretty busy people, they make a lot of heavy decisions. It would take more time than most of us have to even skim through their top 1,000 most important in-office moves. But instead of any of that, the headline stories in the country's leading paper are that one senator is "low key" and another lacks "realness."

No joke, that was Judith Warner's offering in the Times on March 14. "The Really Real Hillary" was the name of the piece and the man-on-the-street quote went like this: "I'm not feeling the realness from her." Warner chimed in: "She's got a voice that is metallic and somewhat atonal...she clearly isn't wired to project 'realness' on the national stage. And frankly, for political figures, projection is what matters most."

How much of this bullshit can we take? When will it end?

[From Issue 1024 — April 19, 2007]

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