Media Matters: So Now the Press Tells Candidates When to Quit?

This article from the media watchdog organization Media Matters is such a well documented analysis of the media’s current push for Hillary Clinton to exit the race for president that I wanted to share it in full. Regardless of which candidate you support, you can’t help but be aghast by how the echo chamber reverberates through and by the political media. The piece lays bare the process by which a narrative gets floated, then picked up widely from the New York Times to the local radio talk show, then beaten like a drum until it fills all the airwaves and leaves no room for a different point of view.  And in this case, the narrative has a distinctly sexist tinge; all the better that a man, Eric Boehlert, wrote it. So no one can say the author is just  being paranoid. Read on…

So now the press tells candidates when to quit?

History continues to unfold on many levels as the protracted Democratic Party primary race marches on, featuring the first woman and the first African-American with a real shot at winning the White House.

Here’s another first: the press’s unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It’s unprecedented.

Looking back through modern U.S. campaigns, there’s simply no media model for so many members of the press to try to drive a competitive candidate from the field while the primary season is still unfolding.

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Until this election cycle, journalists simply did not consider it to be their job to tell a contender when he or she should stop campaigning. That was always dictated by how much money the campaign still had in the bank, how many votes the candidate was still getting, and what very senior members of the candidate’s own party were advising.

In this case, Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was “dumbfounded” by public demands for Clinton to drop out last month. (He now wants one of the candidates to quit after the final June 3 primary.) Yet lots of pundits have suggested that in a neck-and-neck campaign in which neither candidate will likely secure the nomination based on pledged delegates, Sen. Hillary Clinton must drop out before all the states have had a chance to vote.

I realize the political debate surrounding the extended Democratic campaign remains a hot one, with people holding passionate opinions about the delegate math involved and what the consequences for the Democratic Party could be. I’m not weighing in on that debate. I’m focusing on how journalists have behaved during this campaign.

And the fact is, the media’s get-out-now push is unparalleled. Strong second-place candidates such as Ronald Reagan (1976), Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and Jerry Brown, all of whom campaigned through the entire primary season, and most of whom took their fights all the way to their party’s nominating conventions, were never tagged by the press and told to go home.

“Clinton is being held to a different standard than virtually any other candidate in history,” wrote Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix. “When Clinton is simply doing what everyone else has always done, she’s constantly attacked as an obsessed and crazed egomaniac, bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of her party.”

Indeed, even after Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary convincingly last week, she awoke the next morning to read an angry New York Times editorial, “beseeching her to get the hell out of the race,” as Howard Kurtz put it at washingtonpost.com. On the Times opinion page that day same, Maureen Dowd actually turned to Dr. Seuss rhymes to make her point: “The time is now. Just go. … I don’t care how.”

And across town at the New York Daily News, a bitter Mike Lupica was steamed over the fact that Clinton “won’t quit” the race.

Weeks earlier, New York magazine fretted about which senior Democrats would be able to “step in” and “usher Clinton from the race.” Or if Clinton, obsessed with her own “long-range self-aggrandizement,” would finally figure it out herself.

Meanwhile, Slate.com’s snarky Hillary Deathwatch was created to document, day-by-day, the demise of her campaign, complete with a damsel-in-distress cartoon drawing of Clinton atop a sinking ship.

That represented just a fraction of the often offensive get-out-now proclamations that have become a staple of this campaign.

No longer content to be observers of the campaign, journalists now see themselves as active players in the unfolding drama, and they show no hesitation trying to dictate the basics of the contest, like who should run and who should quit. It’s as if journalists are auditioning for the role of the old party bosses.

It’s a new brand of political commentary that leaves some veteran journalists perplexed. “The idea that it’s your job to tell candidates when to get out, and really trying to control the whole process — putting it in the hands of the journalists or the reporters or the columnists — I find that to be new and different,” Haynes Johnson told me last week. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Johnson has covered more than a dozen presidential campaigns and is currently working on a book about the unfolding 2008 contest.

Johnson says he was astonished to read some early calls in March from the media for Clinton to get out of the race. He was stunned by “the pomposity and the arrogance of it.”

Indeed, a very strange leap has been made this year by lots of media commentators who argue against Clinton’s candidacy. Rather than simply detailing her deficiencies and accentuating the strengths of her opponent, which political observers have done for generations, time and again we saw pundits take the unprecedented step of announcing not only that voters should not support Clinton, but that she should also quit. She should stop competing.

More often than not, the analysis ends up resembling poorly argued temper tantrums. For instance, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has written three essays about why Clinton must abandon her race for the White House, each increasingly petulant in tone. (We learned the “rationalizations” for Clinton’s “kamikaze campaign” are “wretched.”) Last month Chait wrote that Clinton’s chance of winning the Democratic nomination this year were closer to Ralph Nader’s than they were Barack Obama’s or John McCain’s. It’s a reasonable comparison, if you ignore the nearly 1,600 delegates Clinton has amassed, compared with Nader’s zero.

Chait also compared Clinton to former presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden, suggesting that if Biden could figure out when it was time to quit the race, why can’t she?

Searching for candidates who did the right thing and went “gentle into that good night,” Chait compared Clinton, whose campaign has secured nearly 14 million votes, to Biden, whose campaign ended abruptly in January after he received roughly 2,000 votes in the Iowa caucuses. That’s who Clinton is supposed to emulate when ending her campaign run.

Quick note: I realize the press is not alone here and that scores of liberal bloggers have also loudly made the claim that the Clinton should drop out of the race. But there’s a clear difference between the two groups, I think. Lots of liberal bloggers have a strong allegiance to advancing the progressive agenda and feel that to improve the party’s chances in the fall, Clinton should give up. That’s fair game, and that’s part of an internal Democratic Party debate that continues to unfold.

And yes, journalists should report on that internal struggle, quote lots of players, raise all kinds of questions, and commentators should provide in-depth analysis about the ramifications. But what we’re seeing this cycle — and it’s unprecedented — is independent journalists taking it upon themselves to weed the presidential field by demanding one of the remaining candidates simply quit.

And no, this is not part of some larger liberal media conspiracy where the Beltway press is desperate to elect a Democrat and that’s why so many journalists are anxious to get Clinton to quit — because it might help the party’s chances in November. The truth is, as The Daily Howler noted last week, the Beltway media’s love affair with John McCain only grows deeper and more affectionate with each passing day.

This is more about media arrogance and unleashed elitism.

In the past there was always an assumption among journalists that candidates had earned the right to decide when they should quit. Journalists also respected the fact that candidates represented a sizable portion of the primary voting public and that the candidates owed it to their supporters to fight on, that there was a symbolic significance for the candidates — and their supporters — to persevere.

With Clinton, though, the press seems to have almost complete disregard for the 14 million voters who have backed her candidacy, as well as the idea that she is their representative in this race. Instead, they treat her entire campaign as some sort of vanity exercise in which voters do not exist.

And if pundits do acknowledge the Clinton voters, it’s often with baffling ignorance, the way Time‘s Mark Halperin claimed many of Clinton’s supporters would be “relieved” and “even delighted” if she dropped out. Really? Delighted? Halperin offered no proof to back up the peculiar notion.

But again, the point here worth stressing from a journalism perspective is that this is all brand new.

Looking back at history, it’s hard to find evidence of the same media response to Ronald Reagan’s failed 1976 presidential campaign. Taking on President Gerald Ford, Reagan lost more primaries than he won, and Ford won a plurality of the popular vote, but neither man had enough delegates to secure the nomination. So the campaign went to the GOP convention, where Ford prevailed. The bitter battle did nothing to damage Reagan’s reputation (in fact, it did quite the opposite), in part because the media did not collectively suggest the candidate was acting selfishly or irrationally. Instead, Reagan walked away with a reputation as a resilient fighter who stood up for his conservative values.

And what about Sen. Ted Kennedy’s doomed run in 1980? He trailed President Jimmy Carter by more than 750 delegates at the end of the primary season and insisted on fighting all the way to the convention, where he tried to get committed Carter delegates to switch their allegiance. The press did not spend months during the primary season ridiculing Kennedy, in a deeply personal tone, for remaining in the race.

And what about Gary Hart in 1984? He and Walter Mondale split the season’s primaries and caucuses evenly, and neither had the 2,023 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Superdelegates eventually determined the winner. (Sound familiar?) Mondale had many of them locked up even before the campaign season began, so after the final primary between Mondale and Hart was complete, it was obvious that Mondale was going to be the nominee because Hart could not persuade enough superdelegates to change their mind and support him.

When Hart took his crusade all the way to the convention, the media did not form a posse and decide it was their job to get Hart to quit for the good of the party. (And the press certainly didn’t form a posse in March to start pushing Hart out of the race.) Nor did the press collectively suggest that Hart had an oversized ego that had turned him into a political monster.

That new media standard has been created exclusively for Hillary Clinton.

And where were the catcalls in 1988 for Jesse Jackson to ditch his quixotic run before all the primary votes had been tallied? He finished with 1,200 delegates, nearly 1,400 behind Michael Dukakis, yet soldiered on all the way to the convention without having a prayer of winning the nomination. There were few if any media drum sections trying to pound him out of the race.

Or Jerry Brown in 1992? He continued his campaign against Bill Clinton through June despite the fact he tallied fewer than 600 delegates. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton has won approximately 1,600 delegates so far.) Brown’s attacks at the time were far more personal and bruising than anything we’ve seen this cycle. As The New York Times reported on June 2, 1992, Brown “put his party on notice that he intends to carry his politics-is-corrupt, Clinton-is-unelectable message to the Democratic National Convention in New York in July, and beyond.” Brown also told the Times that voting for Clinton was like buying a ticket on the Titanic.

At the time, Clinton was actually polling in third place nationally, behind President George H.W. Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot, so why wasn’t the press in a frenzy demanding that Brown drop out of the race because he was hurting his party’s chances in November?

If you look at Reagan and Kennedy and Hart and Jackson and Brown, those men all ran competitive races. But toward the end of the primary season it was clear most of them had no mathematical chance of winning the nomination. (Reagan was the exception.) Yet none of them was told collectively by the press to go home. Nor were they routinely depicted in the media as being self-absorbed.

Today, Clinton does have a chance to win. Yet she has been told by the press to go home and to get over herself.

It’s unprecedented.

10 Comments

  1. Stout House on May 1, 2008 at 4:14 pm

    This piece is interesting but a little misleading. It is the job of op-ed columnists to offer their opinions. That’s why they’re called op-ed columnists. So right away I would jettison exactly half of the criticism laid out here. A big part of the story, then, is the fact that an overwhelming majority of liberal columnists and bloggers have arrived at the same conclusion: Hillary’s despicable campaign tactics are hurting the party, and since the political math favors Obama, Clinton would do well to bow out gracefully. What you call a “narrative echo chamber” in this case is merely a consensus of opinion.

    I agree that calls for Clinton’s exit from the race are ill-advised. Every time those calls reach a certain pitch, Clinton gets a bump in the polls. Americans love an underdog — only in this case Clinton supporters fail to see that the underdog has gone rabid, and that her slavering and indiscriminate gnashing of teeth threatens the entire party in November.

    • Gloria Feldt on May 1, 2008 at 4:14 pm

      Check out “That’s Hysterical” by Linda Hirshman on Slate today:
      here for some additional rather well documented perspective.

      I have to disagree with you about the echo chamber. It is real and it is a snowball phenomenon that candidates both try to use to their own advantage and dread when it is used against them. Truth has no place in it and accuracy only an occasional nod.

      • Stout House on May 1, 2008 at 4:15 pm

        I don’t dispute the reality of the media echo chamber, Gloria. The Republicans have been bellowing their misinformation inside it for years. As I said above, in this particular case I think you’re mistaking consensus for the echo chamber effect. A significant difference.

  2. Stout House on May 2, 2008 at 4:15 pm

    Just read the Slate article. Not surprising that Linda Hirschman, a self-described “aging radical feminist,” would see things this way. It’s also unsurprising that Hirschman supports Hillary Clinton, whose notorious dismissal of the American housewife (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas”) is about as succinct a summary of Hirschman’s book-length feminist manifesto as one could imagine.

    One thing Hirschman neglects to acknowledge in her article, however, is that Bill Clinton, too, has had his stability questioned in recent months. So have James Carville, Terry McAuliffe, and Mark Penn, although in their case the word “desperate” has been applied more frequently than “hysterical,” which is the historically freighted buzzword Hirschman finds so objectionable.

    Choose your word, then: desperate, hysterical, maniacal, whatever. In the end, all describe the same behavior issuing daily from the Clinton campaign. Who else but a political hysteric, feeling her lead fading away, would attack her opponent in the ways Clinton has repeatedly attacked Obama? Somewhere Karl Rove is smiling.

    Hirschman writes: “This charge of insanity—fits, pathology—against any woman who aspires to transcend prior female achievements is the go-to weapon for people who would keep women down.”

    But what if the woman in question shows real signs of becoming unhinged? What if she praises John McCain while labeling Obama unfit for the presidency? What if, days later, she offers Obama a VP slot when Obama is winning the race? What if she sees snipers in Bosnia when there’s only a little girl bearing flowers? What if she routinely forgets her position on NAFTA, endorses a suspended gas tax that most economists reject, leaps to her feet and applauds when Bush talks of the surge working, and dismisses as insignificant the daily defection of high-ranking former supporters? What if she votes for war in Iraq?

    Hirschman cites, among other figures, Lady Macbeth as an example of the slurs used against the good senator. Homicidal intentions aside, I find the comparison useful, at least in this regard. Like Shakespeare’s most fearsome female creation, Hillary Clinton is right now pacing her own battlements, convincing her husband and herself that drawing political blood is necessary to attaining and retaining power. But remember, Lady Macbeth did not enter the play a madwoman. She exited that way, driven mad by her own lust for power and bloodstains that would not wash away. Every death in Iraq, every boast of obliterating Iran, bloodies Hillary Clinton’s hands more. I suspect she’ll likewise exit the stage deeply regretful of the way she’s behaved.

    • Gloria Feldt on May 2, 2008 at 4:16 pm

      Stout House, you are obviously passionate and articulate, not to mention well acquainted with literature. To crib a line ironically from Body Heat, I like that in a man. What I am trying to understand is your loathing and resentment that seems gender based though directed at Hillary on the surface. For example, referencing her personal resentment at being stereotyped as a [read: brainless] tea-serving, cookie baking little woman as though she intended to insult women who stay at home. You don’t even realize the misogyny in that leap, it seems to me.

      I’m not saying you don’t genuinely loathe Hillary–that part is clear. It’s the why you loathe her so deeply and personally that eludes me.

      • Stout House on May 4, 2008 at 4:17 pm

        Come on, Gloria, that’s a cheap shot. My loathing of Hillary Clinton is no more gender based than was my support for her at the outset of the primary season. My fondest political wish, even before Obama officially declared, was for a Clinton-Obama ticket, a wish Hillary dashed in record time for all the reasons I’ve enumerated elsewhere on your blog.

        You say I don’t realize the misogyny in my “cookies and tea” reference, but it seems to me that you likewise fail to acknowledge Hillary’s infamous words as a de facto insult to women who stay at home. No doubt she meant well, and no doubt the press unfairly attacked her poor choice of words, but the implication is clear enough. Right or wrong, on that day Hillary’s casual language privileged women who, like herself, choose to stay in the workplace instead of at home raising children. I resurrected the argument only because it dovetailed conveniently with my criticism of Linda Hirschman’s Slate piece.

        On the Huffington Post yesterday, Marie Wilson, after making an argument not unlike Hirschman’s, wrote the following:

        “Whether Clinton has been the ‘perfect’ candidate is not the issue at hand, and as the president of a nonpartisan organization, I am less concerned with Clinton-the-candidate than I am with what her candidacy represents. Her campaign tactics, voting record, and political maneuverings are up for debate. She may or may not win the nomination. But what she has already, and decisively, won has been a victory for all Americans, male and female, of all races, young and old: Clinton has broken a barrier for women in political leadership. For that, we are the collective inheritors of a great victory. And yet, this win is offset by what it continues to reveal: our deeply embedded cultural fears of politically powerful women.”

        I disagree with Wilson’s conclusion and am personally offended by her dismissal of Hillary’s Rovian tactics. Wilson, Hirschman, and even Gloria Feldt, it seems, are less concerned with Clinton-the-candidate than with what her candidacy represents. And that’s where you go astray. Wilson acknowledges that Clinton’s “tactics, voting record, and political maneuverings are up for debate,” but she neglects to debate them. So do you, Gloria, and it’s disappointing to say the least.

        To me, Clinton’s “win,” as Wilson calls it, is offset by and continues to reveal not our deeply embedded cultural fears of politically powerful women, but the failed promise that many feminists have offered all along – that women would offer something wiser in the way of politics, something more thoughtful and more sane than their male counterparts. Hillary Clinton has not done this any more than Condoleezza Rice has. She has instead grown hawkish, threatening an entire nation of men, women and children with nuclear obliteration. On the greatest economic issue of our time she has chosen not to “throw in [her] lot with economists,” choosing instead to pander for votes with a meaningless gas tax suspension. And she continues to carry out a full-scale character assassination of her political rival, an honorable man whose honorable campaign, despite a few missteps, stands in sharp contrast to her own.

        So in addition to celebrating Hillary’s formidable accomplishments, I think some stiff criticism is in order, if not outright rejection. That’s the road I’ve chosen, and I assure you, Gloria, gender had nothing to do with it.

  3. Stout House on May 4, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    I should point out that when I wrote “[Hillary] continues to carry out a full-scale character assassination of her political rival, an honorable man whose honorable campaign, despite a few missteps, stands in sharp contrast to her own,” I meant Barack Obama, not John McCain.

  4. Gloria Feldt on May 4, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    Regarding this part of your comment, which seems to be your core point:

    To me, Clinton’s “win,” as Wilson calls it, is offset by and continues to reveal not our deeply embedded cultural fears of politically powerful women, but the failed promise that many feminists have offered all along – that women would offer something wiser in the way of politics, something more thoughtful and more sane than their male counterparts.

    Bella Abzug was fond of saying (this is a paraphrase) that our struggle is not to get a female Einstein promoted to assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.

    Please don’t infer that I am calling Clinton a schlemiel, or that by injecting a little Bella humor I am making light of a serious comment. But I think the point you’ve missed is that all feminists want is an equal playing field on all matters. And as the Media Matters piece illustrates, we are a long way from there.As a result, Hillary is being unfairly pushed to leave the race whereas male candidates in similar positions during a race have not been. She has to be tougher than the men because she is getting battered more than the man she’s currently up against, and believe me the banter between her and Obama is sweetness and light compared to what awaits either of them in the general.

    Women and men both have feet of clay. We already knew Hillary’s. We have begun to see Obama’s now, and we will see more as the days wear on.

    • Stout House on May 5, 2008 at 4:18 pm

      You’ve misidentified the core of my previous comment, which is this:

      “Wilson acknowledges that Clinton’s tactics, voting record, and political maneuverings are up for debate, but she neglects to debate them. So do you, Gloria, and it’s disappointing to say the least.”

      There is too much at stake in this election to view everything in terms of the male vs. female dynamic. With respect, you’re beginning to sound like one of those single-issue voters we Democrats have spent eight years bemoaning, only in your case the all-consuming issue isn’t gun rights, illegal immigrants, or homosexual marriage, but gender. Unless, of course, you intend to substitute this shocking dismissal for debate: “She has to be tougher than the men because she is getting battered more than the man she’s currently up against.”

      What a heartbreaking admission. So the end does in fact justify the means after all, for men and women alike? And what do you mean by “tougher”? Hillary Clinton may be many things, but weak isn’t one of them. Let’s at least acknowledge the difference between toughness and old-fashioned dirty politics — a distinction you’ve so far been unwilling to make.

      • Gloria Feldt on May 8, 2008 at 4:19 pm

        The end doesn’t justify the means. But there’s a wide swath of political behavior in-between too bad means and the too bad ends they are seeking to prevent.A different standard has been set for Hillary, nd you know it. People do not criticize the same behavior in Obama and his surrogates who are absolutely vicious. Why? Because they simply like him better. He’s the darling of the media and the moment.Hey, that happens. It’s Hillary’s job to overcome that, and her unwillingness to take the kind so of leadership leaps he did can fairly be criticized.But really now, the fighting between the two of them is powderpuff stuff compared to the usual political contests, and what McCain will be dishing out in November.

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