Cycloptichorn wrote:There's also this question: what if they simply couldn't find as much bad stuff to say about Obama as they could others?
His 'experience' issue works out in his favor this way. Squeaky-clean. Compared to the rest of the field he's practically a saint.
Hm. If you use the logic that he just has too short a track record for there to simply
be much bad stuff to say about him, then according to the same logic there shouldnt have been much good stuff to say about him, either. And yet they wrote plenty of it, some of it substantive, much of it not.
When it came to substance, they had choices that were open to make -- focus on Obama's fabled successes in forging some bipartisan support, at least in Illinois? Or on the fact that, based on his voting record, he is arguably
the single most liberal Senator in the whole Senate? You know the choice they made; it was Edwards they portrayed as the unfeasible lefty.
As for puff pieces, they are a genre, all candidates have gotten 'em -- its just that Obama got a whole lot more than the rest. Mind you, the press, bless 'em, they need a hero too -- what else to alleviate the drudgery of the daily campaign trail -- so they build someone up. Preferably someone with glamour value and the all-essential bipartisan narrative, because there's nothing the media likes as much as a bipartisan Democrat. They did it with Bradley, they did it with Tsongas; on the Republican side they did it with McCain in '00, and - up until he actually entered the race at least - with Thompson earlier this year. And there's rarely any proportional relation to the support that the candidate in question actually has on the ground at the time.
All too awkward candidates, meanwhile, the dreaded populists above all - Jerry Brown, Howard Dean in '04, Edwards this time - are either ignored or made to look ridiculous or malicious; they dont fit the bill, they are not
like the journalistic and political classes. There's nothing the pundits like as much - in a Democrat, at least, the exotism of attractively "rugged" candidates is exclusively reserved for Republicans - as someone they recognize themselves in. Someone sophisticated, and ever reasonable and pragmatic, someone who doesnt, well,
scare them, or challenge them too much, or take too openly a partisan stand. Somebody who naturally appeals to their social/cultural profile, the higher educated, higher income, culturally liberal, and economically enlightened, but not all too assertive.
They would just
love a Bloomberg candidacy... never mind that the culturally liberal/economically moderate political corner is already overcrowded, and that the real lack is of an economically populist, culturally conservative independent. They would murder one of those though.
