Don't use stories biased against Bill to support Obama
Wed Apr 16, 2008 at 05:15:35 AM PDT
One of the things that annoys Obama supporters is how some Clinton backers who previously showed a healthy skepticism for dubious right-wing sources and who previously showed an impressive capability to sniff out bias in a news article have suddenly turned to uncritically quoting sources with an obvious agenda against Obama.
Well, folks, it goes both ways. Time for the Obama backers to stop presenting Clinton bashing as if it were straight news. This extends to unfair criticism of Bill, of which there has been a lot recently.
Now, this is not to say that I don't think Bill has made any mistakes. For a savvy politician, he has been surprisingly tone-deaf at times, most notably comparing Obama's win in SC to that of Jesse Jackson in a seemingly dismissive manner, and more recently reviving the Tuzla story by inaccurately defending his wife's statements. This is also not to say that I particularly appreciate the campaign that Hillary is running (and I presume Bill has some influence over this), and I think a lot of the backlash against the Clintons derives from their own words and actions. However, some stuff is just flat-out unfair, and we should reject it for two reasons: first, because we should discourage this kind of politics and media irresponsibility, in which they seek to fit everything into their manufactured narrative and try to generate controversy, and second, because we should preserve the legacy of the Clinton presidency, which was quite good if not perfect, and of Hillary's Senate career, and not undo past Democratic triumphs because of present anger.
An example, one of many but this one is the most recent: this piece off the Boston Globe website titled "Bill Clinton: Older voters too savvy to fall for Obama." Now, maybe I have an advantage here in that having lived in Boston I know perfectly well to approach anything written by the Globe with a wary attitude. They've done some fine work (notably on the church abuse scandal) but they've also earned a reputation, in my circles at the time anyway, for being careless with facts and sensationalist with reporting. Let's look at the article:
QUAKERTOWN, Pa. -- Older voters gravitate to Hillary Clinton because they're too wise to be fooled by Barack Obama's rhetoric, former president Bill Clinton told Pennsylvania voters today.
Clinton's comments, to a packed high school gym about an hour north of Philadelphia, were one part presidential politics and one part legacy protection.
Woah! Bill slams young voters, campaigns for wife by talking about how great he was. Ok, so it's not a quote, but surely the author wouldn't exaggerate his paraphrase, would he? Reading on, the answer appears to be... sadly, yes:
"I think there is a big reason there's an age difference in a lot of these polls," he said. "Because once you've reached a certain age, you won't sit there and listen to somebody tell you there's really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years; that there's not much difference in how small-town Pennsylvania fared when I was president, and in this decade."
Now, this is a relatively inoffensive statement as far as younger voters go -- it's perfectly reasonable to point out that older voters were more politically aware during the Clinton administration and that those who remember the 1990s fondly would be less drawn to Obama's message of basically starting over. It also fits into Hillary's "experience" message -- he claims she appeals to voters with experience. It is not really fair to twist this into "Bill Clinton slams younger voters, says they're being fooled" (for example) or to construe this as Bill saying younger voters are dumb.
There is an aspect of this statement that can be criticized legitimately, and that is Bill's implication that Obama did, in fact, say that there was "really no difference" for Americans or Pennsylvanians under Clinton and under Bush. That's reading too much into Obama's comment that "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration..." This is typical of Obama's commentary on the Clinton years -- not positive, but not inaccurate (he's discussing jobs in some small towns, remember) and consistent with his message that it's not enough to elect a Democratic president, we need new players in Washington and a new way of approaching these lingering problems. Now, Obama probably intended an implicit comparison between Clinton and Bush here, or at least he didn't go out of his way to say that Clinton was better than Bush, but technically it is unfair for Bill to say based on this quote that Obama is claiming there's "really no difference" when Obama doesn't quantify the degree to which these small-town jobs were lost under Clinton versus under Bush. So there is a fair point to note, and an interesting topic to investigate -- which areas of the country did well under Clinton, which not so well, and why? Would Obama's proposals really address this? And so on... a substantive discussion!
Instead, we get bickering over trivialities and lazy "reporting" that seeks to manipulate readers. The article gets worse:
Last week, however, Clinton seemed to suggest that older voters might be more absent-minded than wise. Defending Hillary Clinton's faulty recollection of landing under sniper fire during a 1996 humanitarian visit to Bosnia, the former president said of her critics, "When they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too."
Right, because Bill's humorous attempt to minimize the fallout from Hillary's undeniable exaggeration of the dangers she faced was somehow a slam at older voters. Give me a break. He's an older voter himself, as is Hillary. Heck, if I wanted to paint him in the best possible light, I'd say he's also attacking McCain here -- trying to get voters to think something like "Sure, Hillary messes up an anecdote now and then, that happens as you get older. Of course, she's a decade younger than McCain, who can't keep Shiite and Sunni straight..."
Various explanations have been advanced for Bill's supposed sudden slip in his ability to charm, covering a range of tin-foilness, from him suffering from side effects of surgery to him attempting to sabotage Hillary's run so she doesn't eclipse him. The most obvious explanation is that the media is advancing a narrative that is none too flattering to Bill, whereas before they overstated his charisma. He probably has dropped a bit in effectiveness, that's only natural since he hasn't actively campaigned for a long time and of course he has aged somewhat, but my impression is that most of what appears to be a dramatic difference in Bill is due to media framing.
We need to be critical consumers and make sure our criticism is on target, and not just playing into the narrative they're trying to sell.
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