How Hillary Can Appease The Press

Kevin Drum, September 12, 2016

 The press is rightfully annoyed. She's a presidential candidate, and she should have disclosed the pneumonia diagnosis as soon as she got it. Those aren't the rules for ordinary people, but they are the rules for presidential candidates, and once again Clinton is trying to slide by them.  

So why did Clinton's people try to hide her condition? That's pretty easy: After months of baseless health speculation by Donald Trump's rumor machine, she figured the press would go full National Enquirer over this. She didn't trust them to handle it in a normal, level-headed way. 

So that's that. There's a gulf of distrust between Clinton and the media that appears unbridgeable. Clinton doesn't trust the press to treat her fairly, so she adopts a hyper-guarded attitude toward everything she does. The press doesn't trust her to honestly disclose anything, so they adopt a hyper-skeptical attitude toward everything she says. Rinse and repeat.

I've been thinking for a long time about the ways Hillary Clinton might possibly appease the press and get them to look at her as a living, breathing whole person and not just Bad Hillary. I think I've finally got it.

She needs to stop being who she is and be someone else.  She could change her name to--I don't know--Mother Teresa or Mother Jones or Jo Schmo from Kokomo.  It's clear she can't go on as Hillary Clinton.

The Hillary she has lived with all her life has to go. The private Hillary can no longer compete with the public Hillary whose persona, crafted over more than 25 years by people who don't even know her, has now become a caricature. It's incredibly difficult to run for president as a caricature, even with an opponent as cartoonish as Donald Trump.

(Here I could say a few thousand words about Donald The Deplorable and never take a breath, but enough about him. I mean. Seriously. Enough.)

So here, for what it's worth, is my suggestion to members of our esteemed Fourth Estate: How about pretending the woman running for president isn't named Hillary Clinton?  How about taking a long, thorough look at that woman's record--whoever she is--to see if there is anything, any little thing, that might qualify her for the highest job in the land?

It's on you to be honest about both the pros and cons of this woman who, for this exercise, is not named Hillary Clinton. This woman has been in public service nearly all of her adult life.  She was a lawyer first and then she married a man who became the governor of Arkansas and then became the President of the United States.

She was a First Lady twice but nobody knew anything more about her than they knew about Laura Bush or Michelle Obama. She was a senator in the state of New York but nobody knew anything more about her than they knew about her colleague, Chuck Schumer. She ran for president against Barack Obama and lost, which brought her some attention but no more than any other losing candidate.  President Obama chose her for Secretary of State but nobody knew any more about her than they knew about Colin Powell or John Kerry.

This woman who isn't named Hillary Clinton has indefatigable energy but doesn't brag about her accomplishments. She's not the best at public speaking but aces it one-on-one and in small groups. She laughs a lot, sometimes even at herself.  She's pretty damned popular both here and around the planet.

There are people who hate her but the numbers are lower for her because her name doesn't carry the stigma created and maintained by a real, honest-to-goodness vast Right Wing conspiracy.  She makes mistakes, some of them true head-scratchers.  She says dumb things she often has to take back.  She has been known to consort with filthy rich people who probably want favors from her, and with celebrities who are known Liberals. But she's just one among hundreds of other politicians who don't have to answer for their every waking moment, so it'll be okay. Since she's not Hillary Clinton, she'll be able to concentrate on talking about her dreams, her wishes, her goals for the country.

(She may even be able to struggle through a bout with pneumonia without several days of full-bore "breaking news", not so much about her prognosis but about her lack of due diligence when reporting it to the hovering, stalking press.)

There is a real Hillary Clinton, almost identical to this woman, but if you, as members of our venerable press, want us to believe you've been looking for her, you're going to have to work harder at convincing us. Put away your magnifiers and look at the whole woman before you. Analyze controversies, don't create them. Report truthfully about what you observe. Include context. Let molehills be molehills.

It's not on us, it's not on Hillary, it's on you. Now let's see who you are.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Crooks and Liars)

How to Stop Ted Cruz? Stop the Presses!

Ted Cruz, that notorious commie-hunting senator from Texas channeling a certain notorious mid-20th century commie-hunting senator from Wisconsin, is just one in a long line of rock star politicians who think they've latched onto the best way to get their cockamamie ideas across:  Get out there and make shocking accusations against either individuals or authority with such astounding stagecraft, the press, the media--indeed, a sizable section of the population--will become such slathering groupies they won't know what hit them.  They will lift you onto their shoulders and carry you along to Celebrityville without a thought to what you're actually saying or why you're saying it.

It helps if you can muster such vitriolic anti-government sentiment there's no chance your minions will consider that you might be fudging it when you insist the Obama administration is "bound and determined to violate every single one of our Bill of Rights", or there are still godless communists lurking around yearning to yank the capitalist bones out of all of us, or there are members of your own party who are working against you when all you're trying to do is save millions of hapless citizens from certain disaster.

It helps if you don't recognize that the disaster is you.  Much easier to pull it off if you can convince yourself you're really on a mission to help and not destroy.  (But if you must destroy, remember you're only destroying in order to, yes indeedy, build a better. . .ah, who cares?  You've got 'em right where you want 'em.)

That's Ted Cruz.

Newsbusters.org

Anyone else think Ted Cruz isn't just channeling Joe McCarthy, he thinks he is Joe McCarthy?  I have to give it to him:  He has McCarthy down to a tee.  He looks like him, he talks like him, he acts like him.  Compare the two side by side and there's no getting around the resemblance.  The shifty eyes, the strategic pauses, the weird gesticulating, the signature haughty-talk--through his teeth, using his nose and not his diaphragm for the air intake, the over-the-top, anti-everything rhetoric.  It's all Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

We've all noticed it, and there's a reason for that:  Ted Cruz wants us to notice it.  It's a major part of his grand strategy.  He's sure he knows us better than we know ourselves.  He wants us to believe there are evildoers around every corner.  Sometimes they're so well disguised we might not even recognize them.  But he does.  He knows who they are..

Never mind that more than three-quarters of the country--including a good number of his own Republican colleagues--wishes he would take his Joe McCarthy Tribute Show off the road and retire it forever.  There's only one thing that could make Ted Kruz happier right now, mere weeks after coming off of his triumphant Shut the Country! tour--if he only had a real-life Edward R. Murrow dogging his every step. 

Cruz, not to be outdone by his doppelganger, lives for attention.  Dana Milbank addressed it in a piece he wrote as the Cruz-instigated government shutdown ended and the Republicans were forced to do damage control:

Cruz left the reporters after a few minutes, but when he noticed the TV lights and microphones outside the Senate chamber, he stopped and reversed himself. After repeating his statement for the cameras, he took a question from CNN’s [Dana] Bash, who pointed out that there has been “a lot of bruising political warfare internally, and you’ve got nothing for it.”

“I disagree with the premise,” Cruz informed her. He said the House vote to defund Obamacare, rejected by the Senate, was “a remarkable victory.”

It was a revealing statement: For Cruz, the victory is not the achievement but the fight.

 Exactly.  Ted Cruz hasn't yet come to the end of Joe McCarthy's story.  It ended for McCarthy when the press finally tired of the phony drama, finally came to grips with the depth of destruction (and possibly their own roles in it),  and turned its back on him.  When Joseph Welch uttered the now famous words, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" it was as if the dawn broke and, in an instant, the darkness ended.  (Full text here) The crowds, the politicians, the press, cleared the room, leaving McCarthy behind.  He was heard saying to no one in particular, "What happened?  What did I do?"  Nobody answered.  He was done.

And someday soon, hard as it will be for him to believe it, Ted Cruz will be done.  It will happen when the press decides it's time and not a moment before.  They hold his celebrity and his power in their hands and if they've learned anything from the past,  I hope they've learned there is no honor in building up demagogues simply for their own peculiar enjoyment.

I look forward to the day when they're finally over that.

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Cross-posted at dagblog and featured on Alan Colmes' Liberaland 

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Picked up on Crooks and Liars MBRU.  Thanks, Tengrain!

What's the Matter with the Media? Or, What if they gave a Quran-Burning and Nobody Came?

A wacky preacher in a tiny "church" in a rinky-dink town comes up with the idea to burn a dozen or so Qurans, the Islamic holy book, and chooses the rife-with-symbolic-symbolism of September 11 as the date for his glorious bonfire. Somebody gets wind of the story and thinks it would make good copy. Christians burning the Muslim holy book!  It can only mean that Armageddon is next.

That was a few weeks ago. Today, three days before the ritual burning of the books, the media circus is outdoing itself in a rending-of-the-garments, frothing-at-the-mouth, what-does-it-all-mean yakkity-yak.

All it means, when all is said and done, is that a wacky preacher in a tiny "church" came up with a really dumb, irrelevant idea for drawing attention to 9/11. It goes without saying that burning holy books is disgraceful and disrespectful and blasphemous and sacrilegious. But it's one wacky preacher in a little, tiny "church" and. . .yeah.

The little story surfaced at the same time as fuss was being made over the building of a supposed "mosque" right exactly ON the Twin Towers site (or so it was reported early on), and the tie-in was just too delicious to pass up. So now it's gone international and every politician who can get near a megaphone is weighing in and everybody is apalled, just appalled, but freedom of speech and all that--and now comes the wringing-of-the-hands.

What to do, what to do?  The president needs to do something! (And while we're at it, what's he doing about anything?  More talk, few answers, so let's get back to the real story:  The wacky preacher in the tiny "church". )

Meanwhile, every mortal media personality is running after the wacky preacher to see if he can't be dissuaded from burning those holy books.  But God has answered his prayers!  He's on TV!   So, no, he hasn't changed his mind.  Because if he changes his mind he's just another wacky preacher in a tiny "church" and his 15 minutes are up.

Now, because the story has grown to humongous proportions,  the religious leaders of all faiths are asked to weigh in, and if there's anything good about this story, it's that:  There is a place for conversation about religious tolerance and it can't be discussed enough these days. But--I don't know--it feels like gathering the best of the best and setting them up in a trash-strewn alley.  Their reasons for being there might make sense, and of course we want to hear what they have to say,  but, really--you couldn't find a better room?

Much has been written about the excesses of the 24-7 controversy-driven media and their lust for juicy media-driven stories, and none of it really bears repeating, but am I alone in wanting enough to finally be enough?

How many stories have pounded us day after day that started out as nothingburgers and should have stayed that way?  This man Terry Jones and his idiotic hate message would have wafted into the wallpaper and disappeared if not for the gossip-lust of an entire industry that originally took pride in reporting and analyzing the news.

Unbelievable that today what should have been a non-story has grown into an ugly international incident and could have ramifications for years to come.  So please, illustrious members of the Fourth Estate, guardians of a free and honest press, graduates of the best J-schools in the land--do a little soul-searching here and drop this story like a hot potato.  I'm begging you.

Do your best to wake up on Saturday morning and pretend there's no such thing as a wacky preacher at a tiny "church" preparing to burn the holy books of another religion.  Do not get dressed in your best, do not write impassioned copy designed to further enrage, do not deliver it in your usual breathless fashion.  Do not go there.

I'm begging you.

Ramona