Yeah, I thought this Eugene Robinson column (in which he argues that of course the media isn’t guilty of covering Clinton differently from Obama!) was a tad disingenuous. So did Bob Somerby. Go read it all:
In the passage about Edwards, note the perfect gong-show logic when Robinson discusses the treatment of wardrobe and appearance. It must be OK to do this, he reasons, because we have been doing this.
In Robinson’s penultimate paragraph, note the way he simply asks three questions about sexist press coverage—then makes no attempt to answer them.
Note, again, the masterful way Robinson disappears Matthews and Shuster (and of course, Tucker Carlson). A big, real controversy is actually raging about the questions he claims to be raising—a controversy about his own TV network. But trust us: Most of his readers don’t know that. And Robinson, pretending to stage a discussion, is careful to keep it that way.
But the most ridiculous thing Robby says in that passage lies in its very first paragraph. According to Robinson, there’s “a pretty solid consensus on what’s racist and what isn’t.” But that statement is almost surely false—and this problem lies at the heart of what has happened to Clinton. As Dionne notes today, her downfall began on October 30, but it was the later claim of race-baiting by her campaign that truly drove her decline. (“[T]he numbers tell the story,” Dionne writes. “Before South Carolina, national polls gave her leads as high at 15 to 20 percentage points; by Super Tuesday, her advantage was almost gone.”) In large part, those numbers changed because the press corps kept accusing the Clinton campaign of racially inappropriate conduct. But, as Krugman’s column suggests, there plainly isn’t “a pretty solid consensus on what’s racist and what isn’t.” Once again, here’s Krugman’s view about one of Clinton’s comments:
KRUGMAN: During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.
To Krugman, the remark was “entirely reasonable.” Yet many in the press corps did present it “as some kind of outrageous denigration.” What does Robinson think about this? We don’t have the slightest idea. As usual, he just doesn’t say.
Mainstream journos are almost never honest when they discuss the ways of their guild. Today, Robinson plays it very dumb. Robinson proves he’s a part of the guild—part of the NBC boys club.
I don’t have time to recapture it, but you should take the time to present Hillary’s original (total) paragraph on MLK and LBJ instead of using this artifice of secondary and tertiary comments. IMO, more useful.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12267
HILLARY CLINTON: Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.”
The full quote is actually:
I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, “We are going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.
I liked the NYT (9-Jan) Editorial:
Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Dr. King faced. Former President Bill Clinton, who seems to forget he is not the one running, hurled himself over the edge on Monday with a bizarre and rambling attack on Mr. Obama.