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(Not) Vetting Barack

By pharrell

For some time now, the Clinton campaign has insinuated that if the press would only cover the scandalettes in Obama's past, Clinton would have locked up the Democratic nomination by now. The real problem for Clinton, however, isn't that the press hasn't checked into Barack's record--it's that when they do, they find that, to quote the immortal Gertrude Stein, "there's no there there." The irony is that the media stopped covering these sorts of non-scandals out of regret that too many of them landed on Page One during Bill Clinton's presidency.

Sure, Barack's made mistakes. Take just two illustrations:

His real estate deal with Tony Rezko. The press hasn't given it more play because the facts simply don't merit prime-time news coverage--there's no evidence that Barack doled out favors in exchange for the deal, and all the transactions seem to have been at market prices (indeed, Barack's purchase of a vacant strip of Rezko's adjacent lot seems to have closed at a significantly above-market price). Any dealings at all were, as Barack admitted, "boneheaded," but those that actually occurred don't have the makings of major wrongdoing.

Recent allegations that Barack is cozy with a former member of the Weathermen leftist terrorist group have an even thinner basis, and the problem here isn't that the press hasn't checked out the allegations--it is that they have done so too thoroughly. The fact that Barack served on a community board and later got a $200 donation from a man he probably had no idea had once been a member of the group--he's now a professor at an Illinois state university--just doesn't strike reporters as meriting the 11 o'clock news.

It's true that Bill Clinton got raked over the coals for comparably minor sins--though in fairness, the press started covering the truly petty Clinton scandals only after discovering that they occasionally blew up into somewhat more serious misdeeds. But after getting blasted for years by, among others, Hillary Clinton, for its excessive focus on minor scandal, the press finally decided to clean up its act, at least a little bit. This cycle it has given scant coverage to petty scandals on either side (if you doubt this, just imagine how the press would have covered Hillary's relationship with Norman Hsu ten years ago). Most of us view this as progress, and it's a little ironic to see Clinton's campaign trying to undo it.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on February 26, 2008 (boomark / email).