Watchdog Blog

Myra MacPherson: Low Roads and What the Media Should be Asking

Posted at 2:29 pm, May 13th, 2008
Myra MacPherson Mug

Finally, a mainstream columnist has hit hard at the heart of the smarmiest aspect of the Clinton campaign. On Saturday, Bob Herbert quoted Hillary in the New York Times:”There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

Herbert remarked: “There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

“He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

“The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.” And, Herbert added, it is also an insult to whites, many of whom feel one’s color shouldn’t matter.

Is there a sad corollary that it took an African-American columnist to point this out dramatically? Most of the media have been tiptoeing around the subject of race-baiting–bolstering their silence about scurrilous campaign tactics by showing that polling data indicates there is a problem for Obama.

Hillary had her chance to take the high road before Indiana and North Carolina. It would have brought many, including a fallen away cadre of disgusted feminists and women, immediately into her corner. That chance came during the dismal ABC-TV debate when George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson orchestrated continued questions about the black Rev. Wright.

Had Hillary only said: “I think these questions are unproductive and we need to get to questions that matter to the voters”! Instead she played the eager debater, nodding agreement with the moderators, asserting that continuing the debate on Rev. Wright – and by extension dramatizing Obama’s blackness — was legitimate inquiry, and adding her own fire to the woodpile. Now that her populist lipgloss moment dedicated to wooing white blue-collar voters is nearly over, even though she is expected to do very well tonight with this group, perhaps the Wellesley grad can find her “G’s” again—instead of goin’, walkin’, talkin’, thinkin’ and speakin’.

However, the race on race has just begun. As pundits now warn, Karl Rove and company are preparing to make the anti-Dukakis Willy Horton ads look like kindergarten exercises. The question now is not whether the Democrats have torn themselves apart in a vituperative primary but whether the Republicans will tear the country apart.

Today’s media could do all voters a service by asking the questions of both Obama and McCain that really matter: Who will you pick for your cabinet? As your advisors? For the Supreme Court? Hammer away. Don’t let them fudge with generalities. Don’t let them off the hook.

After these last eight years, we need to know up front. For far too long, presidential candidates have gotten away with keeping those appointments secret, for fear of alienating their prospective pool of possibilities.

This time it is up to the media to see that Obama and McCain do not duck and dodge on this. Whom they pick will say volumes about who they themselves really are.



2 Responses to “Low Roads and What the Media Should be Asking”

  1. Not a country lawyer says:

    Although it is correct that the press should spend a lot more time asking candidates about policy and plans and a lot less on gotchas, that exercise can get too antiseptic for voters. Hillary Clinton would have been better-served if she had taken moral positions, and voters would have been more informed if the candidates had been asked about those. Hillary should have defended Barack Obama against the specious inquiries about his religion instead of washing her hands of the matter. She should have denounced the racism that was interjected into the campaign instead of trying to use it to her advantage. The press should have been asking her how she could run for leader of the free world if she wasn’t willing to lead on these basic moral issues. Hopefully, the press will query both Obama and John McCain on such matters in the coming months. It is truly amazing that Hillary Clinton got a comparatively free ride from critics in the media when she said that only she could get white, working class votes, and this from a woman who borrowed an African proverb for the title of her book, “It Takes a Village.”

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