By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 5, 2008

For most of the past year, the news media treated Hillary Clinton as inevitable and Mike Huckabee as invisible.

In the wake of Thursday's Iowa caucuses, those judgments are looking rather shortsighted.

Until recent weeks, Huckabee was regarded as an asterisk, a former Arkansas governor whose entry into the presidential race didn't even warrant a mention on the "CBS Evening News." He was good for comic relief -- the wisecracking, bass-playing, weight-losing preacher man -- but not portrayed as a serious threat to win in Iowa or anyplace else. The media's chief benchmark is money, and Mitt Romney had truckloads of it and Huckabee very little.

Barack Obama, who beat Clinton in the Democratic contest, was initially hailed by anchors and pundits as a "rock star," but by the summer and fall he was depicted as a dull candidate who seemed to have little hope of catching up. Commentators openly urged him to attack the former first lady. Obama's winning margin was something of a surprise, but not as big, perhaps, as the bursting of the Hillary bubble that may have been inflated by a year's worth of press.

"Everyone just thought she was going to win -- I mean, how could she not?" says Keli Goff, an African American blogger and former Democratic strategist. "How could a freshman senator no one had heard of until a couple of years ago, whose name no one could pronounce, come out of nowhere and beat a woman married to the 'first black president'?"

Amy Holmes, a black conservative and former Republican speechwriter, says most journalists "are rooting for Obama, in part as a consequence of the media's testy relationship with Hillary. I think the media swallowed the whole concept that she was inevitable and then swallowed her contention that she was the most experienced."

Even on the right, says Holmes, a CNN commentator, "Obama's candidacy is exhilarating and exciting and makes us all feel better about ourselves."

In September and October, with the Illinois senator trailing Clinton nationally by 30 points, journalists began picking apart his strategy. "Does Obama's Message Match the Moment? Reconciliation May Be Hard Sell to Angry Party," a front-page Washington Post headline said.

But even as Obama moved into a virtual tie with Clinton and John Edwards in Iowa, he was spared the kind of searing scrutiny that accompanied Huckabee's rapid rise. Earlier stories about his ties to an indicted Chicago fundraiser remained dormant, and a New York Times piece on Obama repeatedly voting "present" as an Illinois legislator got no traction. He simply has less of a public record to investigate, and spilled some of his own secrets -- such as adolescent drug use -- in his autobiography.

After a debate last spring about whether Obama is "black enough" for the African American community, there has been surprisingly little media focus on his race. Obama campaigns differently than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, and journalists often portray him as transcending race -- much like Oprah Winfrey, whose stumping for her Chicago pal brought him still more good press.

Jim Geraghty, a columnist for National Review Online, says the historic nature of Obama's candidacy has a chilling effect on press criticism: "Okay, you write the piece that takes him down. You take this lovely and inspiring story of racial reconciliation and torch it all to hell. You write the expos¿ of the second coming of Martin Luther King."

On the Republican side, Huckabee's $2.3 million in fundraising for the first nine months of the year -- compared with the $44 million that Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, raised or donated to his campaign -- relegated him to the media's second tier. He was endlessly available for interviews because he badly needed the free exposure.

"Huckabee took the John McCain charm-offensive page right out of the playbook," says Matthew Felling, a media analyst and former CBS blogger. "There was a cutesy factor that Huckabee had to overcome, but that got him media coverage that introduced him to a lot of people."

Huckabee drew some favorable notice for funny one-liners in the early debates, but that was about it. "My mother said he looked like such a down-home nice guy, but in the media in New York and Washington, we don't give brownie points for that," Goff says. "We look at your organization and who you've hired as a strategist."

With limited resources, media outlets focused most of their attention in the GOP race on Romney, McCain, Rudy Giuliani and, during an incredible buildup, noncandidate Fred Thompson. Like veteran Democrats Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who both dropped out Thursday, Huckabee got short shrift because he showed no signs of breaking out, which in turn relegated him to the periphery.

Romney, meanwhile, was drawing admiring coverage for his fundraising prowess, just as Howard Dean, once viewed as unstoppable, had in 2004. By this standard, Huckabee was a sidebar.

Geraghty recalls thinking that "this is a guy who everyone likes, but he isn't going to take off. When you're at 2 percent and your fundraising is going nowhere, news organizations aren't going to spend any more time on you than they have to."

But many voters, unlike journalists, didn't tune in to the campaign until the final weeks. They didn't know, or care, that Huckabee had been written off as an also-ran.

Huckabee began surging in the Iowa polls in November, and by December he was on the covers of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine. News outlets suddenly started digging up plenty of controversies about his record in Arkansas and pounced on a series of gaffes. But it mattered little, as the former Baptist minister was buoyed by support from evangelical Christians.

Holmes blames the early dismissal of Huckabee on "the media's alienation from religious conservatives. They see those voters as exotic and foreign and don't understand them. . . . This was a case of the Washington press corps being know-it-alls."

Now that the conventional wisdom has shifted -- that is, now that some voters have actually voted -- could the media pendulum be swinging too far in the other direction?