Ground Realities
The loves and dislikes of America's media
The American media appear to have developed a terrific fascination for Barack Obama. That, in a way, is quite all right. After all, the senator from Illinois is a fascinating figure. He does not deliver a speech. He goes into soaring oratory every time he speaks. And he writes with fantastic skill, as his books have so clearly shown.
If you have read Dreams From My Father, an autobiographical work Obama produced when he was a mere thirty three years of age, you could not have failed to note the near literary grandeur he brings into a narration of his life's story, up to that point. If he had not made it as a politician, Obama could well have been a vigorous participant in the world of American fiction.
And so it is not without reason that the press, newspapers as well as television, in the United States has been voluble in its admiration of a man who has had little political experience other than the handful of years he has by now spent in the US Senate. But there is then the other side to this media story about politicians. Every so often in the past five decades, perhaps a trifle more, journalists in America have demonstrated a particular skill in traducing politicians they have had little reason to love.
You do not have to go far to get this point. There before you is Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose suddenly uphill struggle to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency against Obama could well end in tears. A year ago, she seemed to be a shoo-in for the nomination and, around her, people were beginning to talk of a Clinton restoration. But then the media began to take an inordinately high interest in Obama, conveniently dispensing with the need to question him seriously on the issues and so get a proper measure of the man.
On the other hand, Clinton, for all the intelligence and intellectual focus she has been putting across to the country, has not so far quite been given the support she deserves.
Of course, the New York Times has endorsed her as the Democratic nominee (it has done a similar thing for John McCain), but when you go through the entire tenor of the political campaign in America today, you cannot but note a subtle antipathy to the individual who simply wishes to be the first woman to take charge of the White House.
Remember the vast rightwing conspiracy against her and her husband that Hillary Clinton talked about back in the 1990s? That might have been overstating things a bit, but you do get the drift, don't you?
The media in America often seem to work in a pack, in the manner of wolves. In the not so distant past, they bent over backwards, almost, to demonstrate their intense dislike of Richard Nixon. In 1960, when it was yet unwise to predict whether Nixon or John F. Kennedy would win the election, the press made it a point to tell Americans that while JFK looked fresh and invigorating in the television debates, Nixon appeared all shabby, perspired profusely and, worse, had that five o'clock shadow on his face. The media were awesomely, and luridly at times, in love with Kennedy. The fact that Nixon was far better prepared to be president did not matter.
When today you sit back and think of how Nixon as president would have handled the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, on whether he would at all have ventured into the Bay of Pigs in 1961, it is not hard for you to come by the answer. A good deal more maturity would have informed Nixon's actions. But let that be.
The fact remains that the press never warmed to Nixon, not in 1960, not later when he did become president. And then there was Watergate. It made the president a pariah in the overall sense of the meaning. The media never loved him, which is why it is easy to understand Nixon's outburst in 1962 (and this came after he had lost the New York gubernatorial race to Pat Brown). "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, gentlemen, because this is my last press conference," sneered Nixon.
In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller waged a brave twilight struggle for the Republican nomination for president against the extremely rightwing Barry Goldwater. The latter mocked Rockefeller's reputation as a liberal (and even today being liberal in America seems as much as being an irredeemable sinner), and freely went about telling people that should Rockefeller be the GOP nominee against Lyndon Johnson, America would as good as lose its way.
The media duly reported all that and also added its own spice to it. A very large number of Americans, said the press, were wary about seeing a Rockefeller presidency because of his divorce, which was quickly followed up by his new marriage, this one to a woman named Happy.
In 1972, the media clearly rattled Edmund Muskie, at that point the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination against Richard Nixon, by their reportage on his wife. It got to be so exhausting and exasperating for Muskie that he burst into tears one day, a little before the crucial New Hampshire primary.
Since sniveling candidates for high office are not a sight Americans relish, Muskie lost and simply faded away. He would, years later, serve as secretary of state in the Carter administration.
When Senator Eugene McCarthy humiliated President Lyndon Johnson at the New Hampshire primary by garnering 44 percent of the vote to LBJ's 48 percent, the media relished the president's discomfiture. They did not do the next best thing, which should have been to project McCarthy's qualifications for the presidency. They did not, but when Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, almost in the manner of a carpetbagger, they cheerfully urged him on. It was a restoration of Camelot they looked forward to.
Gone were the dreams McCarthy had raised across the country. And buried in all round enthusiasm was the possibility that Kennedy might not in the end win the nomination, and even if he did might not win the election. Kennedy's assassination in June 1968 put paid to everything. But then Edward Kennedy was elected the Democratic whip in the Senate, beating a long serving senator, in January 1969, and suddenly the press thought it saw a second Kennedy presidency before it.
If Robert Kennedy was gone, here was his baby brother to take up the banner for the old cause, whatever it was. Imagine then the terrible disappointment the media went through only months later when the young Kennedy led a woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to death when the car they were in skidded off a narrow bridge and sank in the water. Kennedy walked away from the accident. And with him drifted away all chances of his ever becoming president of his country. The media lost interest in him.
In 1948, it was a beleaguered Harry Truman who fought bravely on to save himself from a widely predicted defeat at the hands of Thomas Dewey. The polls and the press all prepared for a Dewey presidency, and on election night everyone went to bed knowing in their hearts that the next morning they would have a new man to take charge in the White House.
Only Truman kept faith with himself and in God. He emerged triumphant. Dewey's presidential ambitions came to a shocking, screeching halt. The media were left in a state of shock.
In 1980, the American press went on excoriating Jimmy Carter over his failures, but a similar intensity of criticism was not leveled at the Reagan White House when all that Iran-Contra scandal unraveled stage by stage. The cerebral candidacy of Adlai Stevenson, in 1952 and 1956, was certainly not accorded the same degree of enthusiasm as that demonstrated for the lacklustre, run of the mill Eisenhower campaign.
In all the ululation for Barack Obama in this year's campaign, there is the very real danger of Hillary Clinton ending up as the president who never was. And what if Obama, assuming he is nominated, is trounced by John McCain, who famously remains the man who once promised a thousand-year stay for American soldiers in Iraq?
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