From today's Washington Post ((Don't) Meet the Press), Ruth Marcus argues:
It's not as if this president has been Mr. Openness. But by some important measures, George W. Bush is more accessible to the reporters who cover him than are some of the leading candidates to succeed him -- most notably Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
It is obvious that both Clinton and Obama are running tightly controlled campaigns. But Marcus' arguments misses a key point that helps explain why the Clinton and Obama camps are leery of the press. For whatever reason, over the past decade, the press on the whole has held Democratic candidates and elected officials to higher standards than Republicans. You see this on issue after issue, where Democrats get their answers parsed to death and analyzed for any internal contradictions, while Republicans are allowed to pass off glib evasions and outright lies as adequate responses.
Think about the President's ever-shifting promises in the Plame affair. To this day, we don't know if Rove and Libby just lied to Bush and he decided to ignore it, or whether he simply lied to the nation when he promised to punish anyone discovered to have leaked classified information. Both are extraordinary situations. Either two senior presidential advisors lied to the president and somehow managed to keep his confidence, or the president lied to all of us. And yet, despite off the the press conferences Marcus alludes to, we don't know which it was.
Think about Bush's bland evasions on whether we torture, or his empty insistence that Alberto Gonzales did nothing inappropriate in firing U.S. Attorneys for political reasons. And these are just relatively recent cases. Go back and look at how little push-back Bush got on his attempts to link al Qaeda and Iraq. On the other hand, Clinton is getting beat about the head and shoulders over playing the "gender card" after the last debate. Obama got slammed repeatedly for his unwillingness simply to parrot the conventional wisdom on issues like pursuing bin Laden or threatening to nuke our enemies.
I think there are two reasons for this dynamic, both linked to the fact that most mainstream reporters are liberal. First, liberal reports want to prove they are objective, and they do that by bending over backwards to give conservatives "fair treatment" while showing they are tough on liberals. Second, they have also given up on conservatives. They know Bush is going to mislead and dodge, so they ask pro forma questions and when he conforms to their low expectations, they just sigh and move on. On the other hand, they respect and admire many of the liberal candidates and expect them to demonstrate erudition and eloquence on a hourly basis. It is a completely tilted playing field, and while I would like to see Clinton and Obama be more available in theory, in practice I can understand why they choose not to.
Bernard Finel
www.bernardfinel.com