At the end of John Heilemann's long, fair-minded and overdue assessment of how Hillary Clinton's star has risen in the past six months, even as her political fortunes have faded, there is this curious attempt to hand out blame for her treatment in the news media:
But when I ask her former staff for particular examples of sexism in the press, they exhibit less restraint. “The whole MSNBC crew,” says Lewis. “I mean, at what point in Chris Matthews’s career do we choose? Then there was night on CNN when [Republican strategist] Alex Castellanos said, Well, it’s appropriate to call some women a white bitch because that’s what they are.”
Well, not to make a rhyme, but that's rich coming from Ann Lewis, the most android-like Clinton loyalist ever to grace a television camera.
Anyway, Heilemann concludes with this analogy, which is the kind of overreaching statement that he should've guessed would be turned into a pull-quote, and from there a blog post:
How much any of this affected the outcome of the battle between Obama and Clinton is impossible to gauge. But what’s indisputable is that the belief among many women that Hillary was ill-treated by the press is one of the most powerful contributing factors to her renewed, and greatly enhanced, status as a feminist hero. And in this she shares something vital with her husband. It was only after Bill Clinton’s impeachment ordeal that he became a beloved figure on the traditional left, which had long regarded him warily before his persecution by the special prosecutor and the congressional Republicans. WJC, in other words, was fortunate in his enemies. Now HRC finds herself similarly blessed; in Chris Matthews she appears to have found her own version of Ken Starr. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating once again. Whatever else one thinks about the Clintons, there’s no denying that martyrdom has been very, very good to them.
Right ... at least until Obama loses. (I'm not saying Obama will lose; I'm just saying if he does, the ensuing recriminations would wipe out any good feelings people have about the Clintons, as this recent presidential candidate could attest.)
But back to the Ken Starr reference. Two obvious things spring to mind: One, Starr could've removed the president from office and put him into a Club Fed, so that alone makes any comparison to Matthews or MSNBC, who lacked any even vaguely analogous power to Starr's, absurd. Second, Starr was relentless prosecutorial and adversarial in his treatment of even minute evidence that might be used against Bill Clinton. Reasonable people can disagree how hard Chris Matthews, or MSNBC in general, was on Hillary Clinton compared with Barack Obama. But to say that every development in Campaign 2008 was used by Matthews, Joe Scarborough and other MSNBC personalities to discredit Clinton and promote Obama is just the kind of idiotic reductionism that Clinton loyalists accuse Matthews of doing.
We can certainly argue whether Matthews was right to say, way back in November, that Hillary had an "anti-male thing" going, but there is no denying now that gender morphed into a surprisingly strong campaign dynamic in the primaries' waning days. To single out Matthews, one must rely on a clip reel of selectively chosen sound bites that tell us little more than that Chris Matthews has a big yapper that runs slightly faster than his brain at times -- as though no one else on TV or radio functions that way.
I hate to do this again, but I must point out the little-noticed demographic split in the way Campaign 2008 has been received. Relying on anecdotal evidence from his mailbox, Heilemann infers that women of all ages are upset at Clinton's handling in the press. I would counter that Democratic and progressive women under 50 are less sanguine about the whole thing, perhaps because they broke much more strongly for Obama. And unlike on CNN and Fox, they at least have one voice on MSNBC: Rachel Maddow.
Isn't he making more of a statement about how the Clintons are really good at playing the role of the victim, and at finding a bad guy on which to focus their supporters' outrage? I didn't read that as him saying the comparison between Starr & Matthews had merit, just that Matthews has become Hillary's bad-guy-of-choice.
Posted by: Tracy | June 26, 2008 at 12:59 AM