Partying Like it’s 1993

by digby

I just have to reiterate how bemused I am by Obama being harangued for breaking his promise to bring change by appointing a couple of ex-Clinton officials while simultaneously being lauded to high heaven for having the good sense to stuff as many Republicans in his administration as possible. I know that the Republicans would like to disappear the Bush administration from history, but is it really possible for them to do it while Bush is still in office?

I really think the change people voted for was far more likely to mean change from Republican rule or perhaps a mandate that politicians agree on everything (as if that were either possible or desirable) than an overriding desire to purge the government of experienced Democrats. If these gasbags want to make a case against these people on the merits, that’s fine. Or if they really believe “change” signified that Obama would only hire people who’d never been in politics before, I suppose they can make that case too. (It must be what some of them meant since they are claiming that even naming Tom Daschle, who was not a member of the Clinton administration, is a sign of Obama breaking his promise.) But to argue that he must be bipartisan and keep recent Republican administration figures like Robert Gates or hire Colin Powell, while simultaneously howling that he is choosing people with experience under the most recent Democratic administration because that isn’t “change” doesn’t make sense.

Unless, of course, by “change” they think Obama meant reverting to a time when the Clinton-obsessed political media behaved like puerile wingnut stalkers, dancing to GOP operatives’ every depraved utterance. Slavering over the Clintons, while righteously decrying the so-called soap opera (which the media itself creates), is the only thing they really do well. Overseeing a rogue presidency and a despotic congress was certainly beyond their ken and neither are they obviously interested in seriously reporting on the politics of boring junk like a crumbling economy, the planet heating up, torture and injustice or wars and destruction overseas. Indeed, those aren’t even political subjects to them. Nope, they clearly voted to change the calendar back to 1997 when they were all on easy street exchanging gossip with each other and taking bets about when they’d finally succeed in destroying Bill and Hillary Clinton. Somebody’s still hoping to collect on that one.

In other news, an MSNBC host just asked, “is the honeymoon over?” Their political analyst answered that Obama should never have expected much of one in the first place. Game on.

Update: By coincidence, Eric Boehlert’s column today speaks to same issues. I’m going to excerpt a big chuck, but be sure to read the whole thing. If you don’t get the history, you’re not going to get what’s happening now:

At the outset of the Bush presidency, when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that “the high emotional temperature of the Clinton years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted.” He added, “I think it will probably take a while to sort of gin that back up again.”

Over the course of eight years of covering Bush, I’m not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration.

It would also be troubling for journalism if the press responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove the press corps wasn’t “in the tank.”

That’s what helped fuel the stark double standard in terms of early coverage of the past two administrations.

One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: “Last week, we could talk about, ‘Is the honeymoon over?’ This week, we can talk about, ‘Is the presidency over?’ ” (At the time, Clinton’s approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)

By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush had been sworn into office, The New York Times’ Frank Bruni penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review about how authentic and at ease Bush seemed with his new role. “George W. Bush is establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, ‘look-Ma-no-hands’ presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook always mirthful,” wrote Bruni. “The gilded robes of the presidency have not obscured Mr. Bush’s innate goofiness — or, for that matter, his insistent folksiness.”

Bruni’s piece was a classic example of what in journalism is called a “beat-sweetener.” It’s where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House beat-sweeteners published in 1993.

“Perhaps never in our nation’s history — certainly not in its recent history — has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw’s piece: “Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed More Like An Autopsy.”)

“The level of hostility in the [White House] pressroom, I think, was extraordinary,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For example, days after the Waco siege between federal forces and Branch Davidians ended in a deadly fireball in April of that year, a USA Today poll showed 93 percent of Americans did not blame Clinton for the outcome. Clift said she thought to herself, “The other 7 percent are in the White House press room.”

And Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield conceded she’d never seen any administration “pronounced dead” so quickly by the press.

The conventional wisdom today is that it was a cacophony of missteps made by the new Clinton-led Democratic team that generated the bad press in 1993. That reporters and pundits simply responded to the bungled attempt at transition. What’s been erased from that equation, though, is the acknowledgement that with or without the miscues, the press had already adopted an entirely new, contentious, and often disrespectful way of treating an incoming president.

What’s also glossed over is the fact that eight years later, the press then radically adjusted its standards — again — for the new Republican president.

I don’t know what will happen with Obama. But let’s just say that the zeitgeist is giving me a disorienting feeling of deja vu.