Gears turn, chew up Obama

By J. Patrick Coolican, Michael Mishak

Friday, March 30, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS MORRIS

Barack Obama, a month ago: Democratic Party savior. Cool, smart, black, great personal story.

Barack Obama, this week: All flash, no substance. Fast and loose with facts, Hillary will pummel him.

After a Las Vegas health care forum last week, Obama was deemed a disappointment by a national magazine writer, and the theme multiplied: Los Angeles Times, The Politico, the Associated Press, CNN.

Time magazine's Joe Klein made it official this week: "Even over here in the Middle East, you can feel the zeitgeist gently shifting - Obama ebbing, for the moment, at least in media- land."

The chattering herd loves a narrative, and this year, just as in past presidential years, the media are moving like a pack, hunting for their beloved conventional wisdom.

The names are unfamiliar to most Americans - Klein, Mike Allen, Karen Tumulty - but these Washington media stars shape the country's perceptions of presidential candidacies, their thoughts finding their way on to TV talk shows and the rest of the media universe.

Something's a little different this time around, though. The vast profusion of new media, especially on the Internet, means less power for the journalists. Liberal online activists, having seen Al Gore and Howard Dean crushed under the weight of conventional wisdom - Gore is a phony, Dean is nuts - are pushing back.

"For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs," said Eric Alterman, a liberal media critic and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "Now the left is learning how to play the game."

Obama's problem apparently began last week in Las Vegas at a union-sponsored health care forum. Other than former Sen. John Edwards, none of the candidates has specific health care plans. They agree on some general principles, which Obama laid out. Some in the pack found his performance lacking.

Tumulty, the Time correspondent who moderated the forum, wrote a blog post: "In the postgame chatter in the ladies room there was a lot of complaining from people who had found his entire presentation vague and unsatisfying."

Allen, former White House beat reporter for Time and now a reporter at The Politico, published a piece Monday noting Obama's "tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips that serve as reminders that he is still a newcomer to national politics."

Richard Cohen, the liberal Washington Post columnist most reviled by liberals, hit Obama in his Tuesday column: "He may be manipulating the facts in order to wrap raw ambition in the gauze of a larger cause."

Finally, the Associated Press, that down-the-middle news organization, confirmed the received wisdom in a news story that probably ran in hundreds of papers: "The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance?

"The freshman Illinois senator began his campaign facing the perception that he lacks the experience to be president, especially compared to rivals with decades of work on foreign and domestic policy," the AP story said. "So far, he's done little to challenge it. He's delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country."

CNN echoed that report the following night, with Bill Schneider, the network's senior political analyst, asking: "At this stage of the campaign, these look like rookie mistakes, but could they become serious problems down the campaign trail?"

Views like that often went unchallenged in the past, snowballing into an overarching narrative. This time, however, online liberals fought back.

Greg Sargent, a blogger at the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo, jumped on the AP story, noting that Obama made foreign policy speeches on March 2 and 17, and a health care address in January. Media Matters, a Web-based liberal press monitor, and blogger Glenn Greenwald dissected The Politico story, which they deemed a "hit piece."

The purpose of the counterpunching was to create a counternarrative, an alternative story to the one developing among the mainstream media. Specifically, the counternarrative says: The Beltway types are out to get Obama. That can be deeply beneficial to many candidacies, especially his, given that a theme of the campaign is that Obama is an outsider offering a new kind of politics.

For the most part, however, political and media observers said the recent criticism is part of the normal ebb and flow of campaign coverage.

"We fall madly in love with him, now we have to find his clay feet," said Susan Rasky, a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley. "It's part of the campaign process: Enthusiasm at the front end, ripping apart at the back end - and hopefully in between there will be some decent analysis."

Todd Gitlin, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, expressed dismay about the process, now a matter of predictable trends: "It's all too tedious - first we fall in love, and then we throw them overboard."

Alterman said Obama's campaign was in part responsible for the hastened honeymoon simply because it promoted Obama as a "different kind of candidate running a different kind of campaign," which served as an irritant - and perhaps a challenge - to the press corps.

Matthew Felling, media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit research group, said the increased scrutiny was a natural and responsible counter to the warm and glowing coverage of recent weeks. Once Obama responds, he said, the trend is likely to reverse.

But Felling cautioned that in their search for balance, journalists can sometimes become overzealous, fixating on small character flaws instead of policy issues.

In a Sun interview last week, Obama anticipated the hail. "The truth is, if you aspire to the highest office in the land, you have to expect you're going to be poked and prodded and vetted . And it's not something I resent, and I think it's appropriate for the enormous job I'm applying for," he said.

Online liberals aren't so sunny about it, though.

Their early counterattack is evidence of their political beginnings. Many first took an interest in politics because they believed the impeachment of President Clinton was a sham.

The combative liberals believe the Washington media took conservative talking points about Clinton, and later, Vice President Al Gore and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean, and turned them into a mainstream, accepted narrative.

Clinton was a slippery figure not to be trusted. Gore was a phony and a liar. Dean was unhinged.

"It's very easy for the press to fall into templates that quickly become caricatures," said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University who's writing a book about President Nixon's relationship with the media.

This time around, online activists are determined to check those themes early, before they gel. Media Matters has been documenting "myths and falsehoods" in the mainstream media about all the 2008 presidential candidates. The group hopes its rapid-fire responses to what it sees as slanted media reports will force journalists to exercise more discipline, said Karl Frisch, a spokesman.

Much of this story was written decades ago, in the seminal account of "pack journalism" and its effect on the 1972 presidential campaign, Timothy Crouse's "Boys on the Bus."

"The press likes to demonstrate its power by destroying lightweights, and pack journalism is never more doughty and complacent than when the pack has tacitly agreed that the candidate is a joke," Crouse wrote.

"A lightweight, by definition, is a man who cannot assert his authority over the national press, cannot manipulate reporters, cannot finesse questions, prevent leaks or command a professional public relations operation."