The Clinton campaign - for all of the claims of bias from Bill and Hillary - are exceptionally lucky that they have a subservient media that will effectively do anything that they are directed to do. When Hillary started to reference Saturday Night Live to claim that she received unfavorable press coverage, the media started being openly more harsh towards Obama. When she stoked the embers of the Wright controversy, the media was only too happy to soak up the story and keep it going - even though it has long been proven that a great deal of the 'controversial' comments...well, when put in context, they weren't that controversial. Lastly, they are exceptionally lucky that the press hasn't given her the Huckabee treatment. Given that she has as little chance of winning the nomination now as the erstwhile governor of Arkansas had after February 5th, the media has continued to cover Clinton as though she maintains a serious candidacy. She doesn't.
But more importantly, what the media - and the DLC types within the Clinton camp - are worried about is that politics will become a thinking person's arena once more. Obama's masterful speech on race was able to break through the fog of media coverage (at least temporarily) because it wasn't easy to compress into a soundbite. In the same way, when one takes Obama's comments on Pennsylvania in context - or even bothers to apply a modicum of rationality when interpreting them - it becomes clear that he's...right. But that's not what the media wants to write about. In a press that has become much more about 'entertainment' - and this horse race, even though one of the horses is effectively dead, the media needs to keep feeding this story. The Wright controversy didn't knock Obama off-stride; in fact, polling afterwards has found that he has widened his lead nationally over Clinton (and narrowed it in PA) since. It's particularly disingenuous of both Clinton and John McCain to attack Obama, given that both are obscenely wealthy, even when compared to the relatively well-off senator from Illinois.
But every time the media has tried to take Obama down a notch, he comes back stronger every time. Why? Because he doesn't treat the American voter as idiots - something that the Clinton campaign does with pathological frequency. Nor does he simply feed the masses 30 seconds, bite after bite, like the media wants. In its current incarnation, the media depends on their viewers to have the cognitive powers of a crackhead who needs a fix just to function at all. But when Obama comes out and does this...
...it becomes abundantly clear that it's not going to work. The enormous applause at the end of the video isn't what the Clinton campaign or the media wants to hear. To them, it's a death knell to the political theater and the cheapening of discourse that has pervaded American politics.
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