The Obama Swoon

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 30, 2006 10:08 AM

"Why Barack Obama Could Be Our Next President," says Time's cover.

"Would you announce on this show?" Oprah Winfrey asked.

"If your party says to you, 'We need you' -- and there's already a drumbeat out there -- will you respond?" NBC's Meredith Vieira asked.

When the media fall in love with a promising politician, they usually shower him with accolades as a way of enticing him into a big-time race. But in the case of Obama, who has been a senator for less than two years, some are dispensing with the niceties.

From the left: "You embody the politics of hope. But such moments don't last forever. I hope you run," writes Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.

From the right: "Barack Obama should run for president . . . Obama is a new kind of politician," writes New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Unreal. The Illinois Democrat waded into this by hawking his new book, and when Obama answered Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" question eight days ago by saying he is thinking about running in 2008 -- rather than the usual phony dodge -- the floodgates opened. It was front-page news in The Washington Post, and the New York Times weighed in with a piece examining the impact on Hillary Rodham Clinton. Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg says Obama would be the instant front-runner.

The subtext is a journalistic hunger for a young, attractive black candidate who somehow seems to transcend race. Not since the media establishment tried to draft Colin Powell for president in 1995 have reporters, columnists and talk show hosts so openly swooned over a potential White House occupant.

Of course, Powell engaged in a great tease about his political intentions and never did make a run, but sold 2 million copies of his autobiography in the process. Could Obama be playing a similar game?

"It seems that the whole media establishment has just been snookered by the PR blitz designed just to sell the book," Lynn Sweet, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, said in a CNN interview.

Obama's appeal isn't hard to fathom. With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, a stint as president of the Harvard Law Review and a style that is both charismatic and conciliatory, he seems to offer an antidote to today's polarizing politics. But with a war raging in Iraq and terror threats around the globe, are the media really pushing someone who two years ago was a state senator in Springfield, Ill.?

To which some of the pundits are replying: Experience? Who needs experience? That just makes you more vulnerable to negative ads. More Senate seasoning, they say, will make Obama seem like just another droning Washington pol.

Obama got elected without a scratch after his Republican opponent quit amid allegations by his ex-wife about being pressured to have sex at public clubs, and replacement candidate Alan Keyes quickly fizzled. The Post pronounced Obama "the party's new phenom" when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention. Before Obama had so much as taken office, he was on the cover of Newsweek, which put him in a league with Tiger Woods and Bobby Kennedy. But that was an early harbinger of a press corps that sees the man as an empty vessel into which its fondest hopes can be projected.

"The bar got set impossibly high the minute after that convention speech," says Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid. Ken Silverstein of Harper's has a cover story this month questioning whether the senator is starting to cozy up to his big donors. Times columnist Maureen Dowd made fun of his "modeling gigs in Men's Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life." And Joe Klein, in the generally favorable Time cover story, said Obama is less than bold when it comes to policy.

If Obama decides to take the plunge, the free ride is over. As Page noted in his please-run column, the media will turn on him like a bunch of vultures. And they won't have far to look: Obama's acknowledgment in his book of having played around with marijuana, alcohol and "maybe a little blow" may seem a bit less charmingly candid in a declared presidential candidate.

Vietor says his boss expects tougher scrutiny if he runs. "For any candidate, there is a honeymoon period," he says. "When an announcement is made, the claws come out and research documents fly out of the back rooms and reporters turn a more critical eye on the candidate."

John McCain was the last presidential contender to cause media hearts to throb, but in the heat of the 2000 primaries, journalists started questioning his temper and his tactics. Reporters have a way of discovering a dark side of even the most admirable public figures. And if Obama takes his pristine image into the muddy arena of presidential politics, even the warm embrace of Oprah won't protect him.

Don't Shoot

Last week, this column suggested that investigative reporting -- the kind that has uncovered a slew of major congressional scandals -- would undoubtedly suffer as some newsrooms get slashed by 20 or 25 percent.

Now I stand accused of essentially arguing, "Don't touch this paper or we'll shoot these investigative reporters."

Slate media writer Jack Shafer draws a comparison to cities that, when faced with budget cuts, immediately threaten to close firehouses as a way of rallying public support. It's wrongheaded, Shafer says, to "somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good. If there is a profession that doesn't think it's essential to the steady rotation of the planet around the sun, I've never heard of it."

Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis also weighs in, saying that what I should lament "is the refusal of newspaper editors to wake up and smell the latte: all the wasted froth that squanders their budgets. The newspaper has to learn what its real value is and that is, indeed, reporting and its editors have to stop defending raw numbers of bodies."

Not to spoil a good food fight, but I don't disagree with any of that. Some newspapers are overstaffed. Not all budget cuts are bad. Not every newspaper in America needs to have a reporter covering the White House, or London, or attending political conventions and writing the same pap as everyone else. What's more, lest they suffer the fate of General Motors by churning out gas-guzzlers, they need to move more boldly into the digital age, which probably requires smaller newsrooms than in the past as their circulations decline.

But many of the corporate executives ordering these cuts don't care about finding innovative ways to cover the news; they just want to please Wall Street by getting the payroll down.

Investigative reporting doesn't just mean maintaining separate SWAT teams. Beat reporters do important digging all the time, but that requires having a few extra days or weeks to pursue leads and pore over records. If, in depleted newsrooms, they have to churn out copy every other hour, the chances that they'll look into the mayor's land deal or the congressman's favors for big contributors are greatly diminished.

Newspapers -- good ones, at least -- do two things that, if their staffs shrivel, no TV station, Web site or blogger will be able to match. One is to provide detailed local coverage of schools, hospitals, zoning battles and town councils. The other is holding public officials and business executives accountable with aggressive investigative work.

They are also tradition-encrusted places that need to become less cautious, less stuffy and less arrogant. But if the critics think that a starvation diet will somehow produce healthier reporting, they are fantasizing.

End of Discussion

"I was hoping he'd say 'You're fired!' " -- Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, recounting how Donald Trump hung up on him during an interview on local criticism of his planned 92-story Windy City tower.

Looking ahead . . . What will Beltway life be like after November 7th? Rich Lowry says the press is soft-pedaling what's in store for the Pelosi reign:

"Let the Nancy Pelosi honeymoon begin. Sure, the current House Democratic minority leader hasn't won a House majority yet, and it is traditional for honeymoons to follow, rather than anticipate, the blessed event. But the media can't help themselves, not when they are tingling with anticipation over the prospect of a Democratic victory.

"Say what you will about Pelosi, but it is a matter of record that she's far left of the center of American politics -- her rating from the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action is routinely a 100 percent; that she enforces party loyalty -- her Democrats voted along party lines 88 percent of the time last year, a record for the past 50 years; that she has primarily occupied herself with blocking legislation in the House -- she has tried to kill practically every Republican initiative, no matter how small; that she uses tough rhetoric -- Republicans are, according to Pelosi, 'corrupt,' 'incompetent' and running a 'criminal enterprise.'

"There's nothing wrong with any of this. Politicians should have deep convictions, and they should work to organize their party around them and to defeat the opposition. Nor is there anything wrong with sharp rhetorical elbows. But the press usually professes to like none of these qualities, and typically dubs someone exhibiting them as 'radical,' 'partisan,' 'obstructionist,' and 'mean-spirited.' Instead, in a typical media treatment, the Washington Post finds Pelosi a 'tough-minded tactician.' She has 'kept the fractious House Democrats in line.' She has 'thwarted many GOP initiatives' by getting the Democrats to 'hang together.' Yes, Republicans accuse her of being an obstructionist, but that's just the sort of name-calling Republicans always engage in, now isn't it?"

Will John Dingell investigate the bejeesus out of Republicans if he gets his old chairmanship back? The New Republic's Michael Crowley came up with a novel tactic--asking him:

" 'Privacy,' he begins. 'Social Security-number protection. Outsourcing protection. Unfair trade practices. Currency manipulation. Air quality. We'll look at the implementation of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. We'll take a look at climate change. We'll take a look at [the Department of Energy's] nuclear waste program, where literally billions of dollars are being dissipated. We'll look at port security and nuclear smuggling, where there's literally nothing being done. We'll look at the Superfund program. We'll take a look at EPA enforcement.'

"He pauses for a breath--but he's just getting started: 'On health, we'll take a look at Medicaid and waivers. The Food and Drug Administration. Generic drug approval. Medical safety. We'll also take a look at food supplements, where people are being killed. We will look at Medicare Part D [prescription drugs].' Is that all? 'Telecom. We'll look at FCC actions . . . Media ownership. Adequate spectrum for police, fire, public safety, and addressing the problems of terrorism . . . We will look also at the overall question of Katrina recovery efforts.' "

Okay, so he'll be busy.

" . . . As Democrats have gained in the polls, Republicans are predicting that a Democratic majority will mean a frenzy of political witch hunts directed at them by newly installed chairmen like Dingell. 'You can expect two years of all-out investigations and attacks and anything they can bring to bear,' Newt Gingrich warned on Fox News last March. Clearly aiming to calm the hysteria, George H.W. Bush recently warned it would be a 'ghastly thing' for the United States if 'wild Democrats' were put in charge of congressional committees. A Washington Times article fretted that 'key administration officials will be so busy preparing for testimony that they will not be able to do their jobs.' "

Does anyone here remember Whitewater ?

" . . . But the curious thing about Dingell's little list is that it targets policies--not people. While some Democrats may dream of hauling Karl Rove to the Hill to discuss Plamegate or forcing Dan Bartlett to testify about Dick Cheney's hunting accident, Dingell is one of a number of future Democratic chairs who plan to focus on substance, not sideshows. And, as strange as it sounds, this may not come as a relief to Republicans. The GOP would love nothing more than for Democrats to go off on half-cocked, mean-spirited inquisitions that generate sympathy for the hapless Bushies. Alas, the GOP's conduct during the Clinton years has provided Democrats with a near-perfect what-not-to-do manual."

George Will is getting increasingly tough on the administration over Iraq:

"Many months ago it became obvious to all but the most ideologically blinkered that America is losing the war launched to deal with a chimeric problem (an arsenal of WMD) and to achieve a delusory goal (a democracy that would inspire emulation, transforming the region) . . .

"A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact. Iraq's civil war has been raging for more than a year; so has the Washington debate about whether it is what it is.

"In a recent interview with Vice President Cheney, Time magazine asked, 'If you had to take back any one thing you'd said about Iraq, what would it be?' Selecting from what one hopes is a very long list, Cheney replied: 'I thought that the elections that we went through in '05 would have had a bigger impact on the level of violence than they have . . . I thought we were over the hump in terms of violence. I think that was premature.'

"He thinks so? Clearly, and weirdly, he implies that the elections had some positive impact on the level of violence . . . what Cheney actually said 17 months ago was that the insurgency was in its "last throes." That was much stronger than saying we were 'over the hump' regarding violence. Beware of people who misquote themselves while purporting to display candor."

Kevin Drum picks up a post from Dan Drezner , who thinks the national security debate has fundamentally changed in the past couple of weeks:

" For the past five years, Democrats have been vulnerable on national security issues. Bush and the Republicans projected a clear image of taking the war to the enemy, and never yielding in their drive to defeat radical Islamists. The Democrats, in contrast, projected either an antiwar position or a 'yes, but' position. The former looked out of step with the American people, the latter looked like Republican lite. No matter how you sliced it, the Republicans held the upper hand.

"The recent rhetorical shift on Iraq, however, has flipped this phenomenon on its head. If Bush acknowledges that 'stay the course' is no longer a [satisfying] status quo, he's acknowledging that the Republican position for the past few years has not worked out too well. If that's the case, then Republicans are forced to offer alternatives with benchmarks or timetables or whatever. The administration has had these plans before, but politically, it looks like the GOP is gravitating towards the Democratic position rather than vice versa.

"If this is what the political optics look like, then the Republicans will find themselves in the awkward position of being labeled as 'Democrat lite' in their positions on Iraq. And in elections, lite never tastes as good as the real thing .

"The mainstream media has run plenty of stories about the meltdown in Iraq and the administration's resultant flip flopping on timelines and blueprints and so forth. But I've seen very few pieces acknowledging that, in practice, this means the administration is adopting the Democratic position from last year. Why? Because that would mean that Democrats were actually right about a major national security issue and had a more serious response to it at an earlier date than the Republicans did. And that would cause everyone's brain to explode. After all, everyone knows that Democrats aren't serious about national security. Right?"

GOP pals of Peggy Noonan aren't exactly staying the course:

"This is two weeks ago, from a Bush appointee: 'I hope they lose the House.' And one week ago, from a veteran of two GOP White Houses: 'I hope they lose Congress.' Republicans this year don't say 'we' so much.

"What is behind this? A lot of things, but here's a central one: They want to fire Congress because they can't fire President Bush.

"Republican political veterans go easy on ideology, but they're tough on incompetence. They see Mr. Bush through the eyes of experience and maturity. They hate a lack of care. They see Mr. Bush as careless, and on more than Iraq--careless with old alliances, disrespectful of the opinion of mankind. 'He never listens,' an elected official who is a Bush supporter said with a shrug some months ago. Along the way the president's men and women confused the necessary and legitimate disciplining of a coalition with weird and excessive attempts to silence Republican critics. They have lived in a closed system. They now want to open it but don't know how. Listening is a habit; theirs has long been to suppress."

This from a pundit who took a leave in 2004 to work for W.'s reelection.

National Review's Media Blog has a good-looking item:

"The Washington Post . . . had this article on how Democrats had more attractive candidates than Republicans (literally), and how that might play to their advantage.

"The research is unambiguous that Ferrin is right: Attractive politicians have an edge over not-so-attractive ones. The phenomenon is resonating especially this year. By a combination of luck and design, Democrats seem to be fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates . . .

"This got us at the Media Blog thinking -- and Googling. We found Diana Irey, John Murtha's challenger, and discovered that she is, by far, more attractive than all the Democratic candidates combined."

Check it out to see if you agree.