Bill Clinton Takes On the Media

" Best political skills. Huckabee. The guy's unusually talented, and still underestimated inside the Beltway.

" Helped himself in Michigan. McCain. Strong as commander in chief, and held his own on economics.

" Helped himself in South Carolina. Huckabee. Boffo answer on religion.

" Best joke. Thompson. Virgins.

" Shadow of his former self. Giuliani. Where did the zip go?"

Many conservatives were dazzled, for once, by Arthur Branch. Here's Andrew Sullivan:

"For me, the big news was that Fred Thompson is alive. He came out swinging against Huckabee in ways that frankly surprised me. Funny at times, acerbic at others, he seemed much more comfortable as a campaigner. I also have to say that on national security, McCain was simply far and away the most reassuring as a potential president. When he ran through his national security experience, you could almost see Giuliani shrinking visibly into his suit. His weak points were his somewhat desperate plea to 'round up' illegal immigrants and his [demagogic] resort to calling any critique of the Iraq occupation as somehow an attack on the troops. Please."

Has the Democratic contest become a class war?

It's not unusual to hear calls for an also-ran to drop out, but this one by Lawrence O'Donnell is striking for its anger:

"John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life. So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.

"If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation."

Are we in the MSM reducing certain candidates to stereotypes? The Nation's Patricia Williams lets us have it:

"To judge by the popular media, being 'presidential' is akin to winning a popularity contest in middle school.

"It's all about what they wear, how tall they are, how much they spend on a haircut, whether their spouses are spousal enough, who has a 'forced jackal laugh' (as the Guardian described Hillary Clinton), who is 'blessed with a weighty baritone' (as Newsweek described Obama) . . .

"It's worth looking at the race and gender narratives already circulating, whose exploitation we need to resist. Barack Obama personifies a civil rights triumph for which we as a society have yearned but are a long way from achieving (given prison, health and poverty statistics alone). But even as he silently telegraphs the image of longed-for victory, should he actually talk too much about racial equality or all that remains to be done, he risks reducing his iconicity as one who floats above it all. In the months to come, I expect he'll be prodded and poked about this, in an all-out media effort to conform him in the polarizing, no-win contradictions that weigh upon his typecasting as a non-raced race man.

"Thus far he's done an admirable job of avoiding the trap; he uses the rhetorical tropes of the civil rights movement in an expansive, inclusive way. He has attracted a constituency of whites and blacks, women and men, Asians and independents--and even a few Republicans. But there are things to brace for: if history is any guide, his suavity will be construed as too silky smooth, his suits too tailored, his 'agenda' too black. Maureen Dowd says that the Obamas 'radiate a sense that they are owed.' Newsweek sneaked in that Obama tends 'toward the grandiose' and that his wife, Michelle, keeps him from 'getting too full of himself.' Owed? Grandiose? Intimations of 'uppityness' will waft up in new guises . . .

"As Senator Clinton campaigned [in Iowa], it was to the snarky drone of Rush Limbaugh's chuckling about her wrinkles and babbling about how no one wants to watch a middle-aged woman grow old. Dowd cast Clinton as a 'dominatrix' 'control freak' who 'whips' men into line, who 'owns' Obama by snubbing him. On NPR, an Iowan who identified herself as 95 tittered in her papery voice that 'all the women are in love' with Obama. No such happy flirtation with 'all the guys' is attributed to Clinton, the pants-wearing, perpetually suspected lesbian murderess of Vince Foster."

So apparently, we slap everyone around.

Critics of the NYT's decision to hire Bill Kristol as a columnist have gone way too far, says ombudsman Clark Hoyt. Sample letter: "That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization."

So nice when we can have a civil discussion, isn't it?

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."