Hillary's Moment

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 8:33 AM

News flash: Hillary shows emotion.

I don't mean to be flip about it--all right, maybe just a little--but watching her choke up yesterday was a revealing moment.

It wasn't that she started weeping or anything. If you've seen the video, her voice breaks and she seems briefly overcome.

The networks' newscasts all led with it. The cable chatters chewed it over. By this morning, it was approaching Dean-scream frequency.

My reaction was thus: Hillary Clinton might have done better to let the voters see this side of her months ago, rather than the steely front she keeps up most of the time. The calculation, undoubtedly, was that a woman--a potential commander-in-chief--can't be perceived as weak. But the alternative was that she is seen as a tightly organized policy wonk running against a man who embodies inspiration, both through his rhetoric and his life story.

Think about Bill Clinton. He could ramble on about Medicare reform with the best of them, but he would bite the lower lip, feel voters' pain and otherwise connect on an emotional level.

Hillary Clinton isn't built that way. That's why her friends keep telling us she's funnier in person than she is in public, and so on. But yesterday, in that diner, she gave us a glimpse of the real person. I'm sure she'll be criticized for that. But not by me.

"In perhaps her most public display of emotion of the presidential campaign," says the NYT, "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's eyes welled with tears, and her voice cracked dramatically on Monday, as she talked about holding up under the rigors of the race and her belief that she is the best candidate for the Democratic nomination.

"If it was not an Ed Muskie moment -- Mrs. Clinton did not cry (or look like she was crying) -- she was certainly on the verge of it after a woman asked her, at a round table discussion at a coffee shop here, how she managed to get out of bed and soldier through each day."

LAT: "Normally the most disciplined of candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up and her voice broke at the end of a campaign appearance here this morning while fielding a question about how she keeps herself together amid the rigors of campaigning."

New York Post: "With her dream of the White House in danger of becoming a nightmare, Hillary Rodham Clinton choked up with emotion yesterday . . . "

Daily News: "She blinked repeatedly as her eyes filled . . . Her voice caught and fluttered."

Slate has a history of weeping.

Turning now to the Republicans: I've talked to plenty of smart people who think John McCain has a good shot at the nomination if he beats Mitt Romney today. That could give him an Iowa-like boost heading into Michigan and South Carolina. If McCain falls short, it's harder to figure out which state he wins in the near future.

If he pulls it out, the media will go nuts, at least for a couple of days. Journalists are poised to write the McCain Comeback Story. In fact, some of them are already doing it. The guy upsets Bush in 2000, comes back eight years later as the front-runner, his campaign implodes, he claws his way back by holding 101 town-hall meetings and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. Plus, he lets reporters interrogate him on his bus all day and night.

And the Romney Comeback Story, where the dogged businessman-turned-politician gets off the Iowa canvas and battles back in the state next door to where he governed? Not so much.

Reporters don't seem very interested in writing that story. Maybe Romney should get a bus.

I'll tell you one thing: This race is getting real personal real fast.

Don't take my word for it. Ask John Dickerson:

"Mitt Romney's rivals don't just disagree with him. They don't like him. At all. Saturday night at the ABC/Facebook debate almost every candidate took a dig at him. It was not the behavior of pygmies trying to tear down Goliath but of hyenas trying to finish off a wounded wildebeest. Many of the barbs were on the topic of Romney's many position changes, his central liability with voters. When Romney said to Mike Hucakbee 'Don't try to characterize my position,' Huckabee shot back: 'which one.' McCain cracked wise several times most effectively (because it'll be replayed on cable a lot) after Romney gave his pitch that he was the change candidate, McCain smiled and said 'Governor Romney, we disagree on a lot of issues, but I agree you are the candidate of change.'

"Romney, who trails McCain in New Hampshire, tried to stay above the fray, rebuking McCain for what he called personal attacks, but it probably didn't undo the fact that no one was giving him any respect. There were moments when Romney sounded like a man in complete control of the facts but I'm not sure those moments of high competence--which he's displayed in previous debates--are that effective in putting the authenticity questions to rest. They haven't so far . . .

"Why the Republican candidates appear to have such issues with Mitt Romney is not exactly clear. The collective animosity goes beyond what would be merely necessary based on the political need to knock him out of the race. Is it Romney's money or that he is using it to fund so many ads knocking against his opponents? Is it his looks? They all see Romney as an opportunist and a phony and we got a chance to see just how much that bugs them."

That's not the least of it, says National Review's Byron York:

"If you think things got a bit testy between John McCain and Mitt Romney during the ABC News debate here at St. Anselm College Saturday night, you didn't see the half of it. After the debate, when top campaign aides and surrogates came to the Spin Room to tout their candidates' performances, members of the Romney and McCain camps said the things their bosses might have been thinking but did not dare utter onstage.

"McCain delivered 'cheap shots,' said one Romney adviser. Another called McCain's criticisms of Romney 'snide remarks' and 'name calling.' Yet another said they were 'unbecoming.' All of which caused Mark Salter, McCain's closest aide, to go off.

" 'Come on, Mitt, tighten up your chin strap,' Salter, standing just a few feet away from the Romney team, told reporters. 'Of all the ludicrous suggestions -- Mitt Romney whining about being attacked, when he has predicated an entire campaign plan on whoever serially looks like the biggest challenger gets, whatever, $20 million dropped on his head and gets his positions distorted. Give me a break. It's nothing more than a guy who dishes it out from 30,000 feet altitude and then gets down in the arena and somebody says, O.K. Mitt, gives him a little pop back, and he starts whining. That's unbecoming.' "

Not everyone is predicting a McCain surge. Joe Klein, for instance:

"The polls still have John McCain comfortably ahead of Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire primary, but I don't believe them. For one thing, McCain has just dragged himself through two of his worst debate performances ever. For another, Mitt Romney--even though under assault constantly in Saturday night's debate--has had two of his best debate performances yet.

"On Saturday night, McCain went from weird to ugly. The weird part was the first twenty minutes of the debate, the foreign policy section, which should be McCain's kitchen--he legitimately knows more about this stuff than anyone in the Republican field--but he was dead silent. And then, in the emotional heart of the debate--the illegal immigration section--Mitt Romney, loathsome as always on this issue, had both McCain and Giuliani totally on the defensive about the definition of amnesty. Romney's argument that a $500 fine wasn't amnesty is ridiculous. What sort of hoops does he want the illegals to jump? Does he want all 12 million in prison? Does he want to deport them--and, if so, how? . . .

"McCain was nowhere. His answers lacked zing. He seemed tired. He was unable to make a vigorous case for himself as a leader--even his references back to his days in the military didn't cut it with this Republican audience. McCain won here in 2000 because independent voters found him far more compelling than the independent alternative on the Democratic side, Bill Bradley. This time, he's [competing] with Barack Obama for independents in a state decidedly more blue than it was in 2000."

Having written the McCain love affair story eight or nine times back then, I was amused by the Jason Zengerle version in the New Republic:

"There's no denying that the media absolutely loves McCain, and I'd imagine many readers wonder why that is.

"The simple explanation is: McCain affords the press access like no other candidate. In the McCain campaign, there's no barrier between candidate and reporter. If you have a question for McCain, you don't have to bother going to his press secretary; you simply go ask him. On some days, you literally spend eight hours with the candidate, just riding with him in the back of his bus peppering him with questions on everything from Pakistan to his philosophical thoughts about suicide. Toward the end of the day, this amount of unfettered access to the candidate can actually be a bit of a problem, when you start to run out of questions for him and there are awkward silences. But, on the whole, it's hard to overstate the sort of goodwill this access engenders among reporters . . .

"P.S. Speaking of McCain and the media, I was at a dinner tonight with various political reporters who are up here to cover the happenings, and it was pretty funny how giddy/relieved they were at the prospect of a McCain-Obama general election campaign, as opposed to, say, a Romney-Clinton one. Suddenly, the next 11 months of their lives look a whole lot more enjoyable."

I will close with my report on the senator from Illinois:

Barack Obama, now the media's odds-on favorite to win the White House, is drawing effusive praise from the chattering classes.

"You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. . . . This is a huge moment," one commentator wrote.

An unreconstructed liberal? An African American hungering for a racial breakthrough? No, it was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, and he's got plenty of company on the right.

The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it." The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.

What's more, the applause extends even to pundits on the right, many of whom routinely denigrate Democratic politicians and yet are strikingly warm toward Obama. There is gratitude, to be sure, that he seems poised to knock off their longtime bete noire, Hillary Clinton -- especially if he wins today's New Hampshire primary -- but also admiration for his inclusive approach to politics and for his sheer talent.

"Who's not proud of this kid?" says Amanda Carpenter, national political reporter for the conservative site Townhall.com. "He has a story people feel good about."

In the wake of Obama's remarks about unity on the night of his Iowa caucus victory Thursday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and self-described conservative, called it "one of the most remarkable speeches I've ever seen."

Bill Bennett, the conservative author, said on CNN that it was a "remarkable breakthrough" for "Barack Hussein Obama, a black man," to win in a "rural, white farming state." Rush Limbaugh added his voice on the radio, saying that Obama and Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner in Iowa, "had really uplifting, inspirational speeches."

The Weekly Standard called Obama "the classiest candidate on the Democratic side." Peggy Noonan, the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Obama had won "with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together."

What explains these cross-party kudos?

"There's clearly a matter of heart going on here," Bennett says after his morning radio show. "He's a cool guy, a handsome guy, has a fabulous voice. A leading Democratic candidate, a black man in America, and he does not talk about race, does not play the race card. It appeals to the better angels of all our natures."

Scarborough dismisses the notion that some conservatives are talking up Obama in the belief that he would be a weak general-election opponent. "I get e-mails from Republicans, who've never voted for a Democrat before, saying they were tearing up during his Iowa speech," he says from New Hampshire. "I don't think they're being calculated and cynical. This is so damn great for America."

The story line -- "a biracial kid with an absentee father whose improbable path carried him from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago to Washington," as Newsweek put it -- has a movie-of-the-week quality for news outlets. The New York Post's headline screamer yesterday, over a picture of Clinton, was "PANIC." By contrast, the Boston Herald's front page blared: "BARACK STAR."

Few liberal columnists are shedding tears over the difficulties of Clinton, who has no natural cheering section in the press. And African American writers -- The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote that Obama's speech gave him "goose bumps" -- are understandably excited.

Not all conservatives have hitched a ride on the Barackwagon. "There's a lot about the Obama movement I find offensive," says National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who predicted two months ago that his campaign was going "nowhere." "There's a messianism -- 'I embody change' -- that if a Christian conservative was saying those things, people would be scared."

But even as a "self-absorbed" Obama spouts "airy cliches," Lowry says, he found himself standing on tiptoe at a recent Obama speech. "It's really something magical," he says. "You're almost not an American if you don't feel stirred by what his victory would represent symbolically. Here's a guy who 50 years ago couldn't have gone in certain restrooms and motels."

Obama's conciliatory tone may also be a factor. He speaks of transcending red and blue states with a coalition that includes Republicans and independents, while Clinton, who has been hammered by the right since her husband's 1992 campaign, boasts about battling the "Republican attack machine."

Some major conservative voices have paid only fleeting attention to Obama -- Fox's Bill O'Reilly says he "ran an excellent campaign in Iowa" and is "very charismatic" -- because they are more engaged in relishing Clinton's defeat. The Standard's cover story this week, with a shot of Bill and Hillary, is "The Fall of the House of Clinton." But that means Obama has been spared, at least for now, the kind of frontal assault that might otherwise greet a surging liberal Democrat.

For some conservative commentators, Obama, 46, embodies the turning of a different kind of page, as the candidate himself has argued. In an Atlantic cover story last month, right-leaning blogger Andrew Sullivan called Obama's candidacy "a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America -- finally -- past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom generation that has long engulfed all of us."

Even Huckabee, in ABC's Republican debate Saturday, acknowledged: "We have to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is touch at the core of something Americans want. . . . He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let's pay respect for that."

Many journalists have a personal fondness for John McCain, who holds a narrow lead in the polls for New Hampshire's Republican primary, based on his round-the-clock accessibility going back to their rides on the Straight Talk Express in 1999 and 2000. Obama has few such relationships with national reporters, who are more in the role of passive observers of a stellar performer.

Politico columnist Roger Simon, in New Hampshire last weekend, contrasted "a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech" by Obama, who offered few specifics, with an event in which "Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail" while part of the audience filtered out.

If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the conservative media are not likely to urge his election by acclamation. There will be plenty of emphasis on his liberal positions and, in an echo of Clinton's criticism, his lack of national experience.

"This is a guy probably to the left of Hillary," Bennett says.

"Do I think he's right on the issues? No," Carpenter says. "But there's a perception you can work with him."

Lowry sees Obama as an elusive target: "No one's really got anything on him because he hasn't really done anything yet. He doesn't have any battle scars. You can blast Obama for what I'd consider an outrageous left-wing statement and it just doesn't get conservatives charged up the way blasting Hillary does."