Hillary Aggression

Michael Crowley:

On June 1, The New York Times published a front-page article titled, ONE PLACE WHERE OBAMA GOES ELBOW TO ELBOW. The feature detailed Barack Obama's love for pickup basketball, his jersey-tugging style, even the time he hit a long game-winning shot after getting fouled.

The Obama camp clearly welcomed the humanizing glimpse at Obama's life; his rivals, probably not so much. In an ordinary campaign, that might have been it. But this is no ordinary campaign--not when Hillary Clinton is a candidate. And so, the Clinton team let Times reporter Patrick Healy, who covers the Hillary beat, know about their "annoyance" with the story, as Healy later put it.

If grumbling about a basketball story seems excessive, it's also typical of the Clinton media machine. Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative. The media has paved a smooth road for signature campaign moments like Hillary's campaign launch and her health care plan rollout and has dutifully advanced campaign-promoted themes like Hillary's "experience" and expertise in military affairs. This is all the more striking in light of the press's past treatment of Clinton--particularly during her husband's White House years--including endless stories about her personal ethics, frostiness, and alleged Lady Macbeth persona.

It's enough to make you suspect that breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. And, if that sounds familiar, it may be because the Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation. "The Bush administration changed the rules," as one scribe puts it--and the Clintonites like the way they look. (To be sure, no one accuses the Clinton team of outright lying to the press, as the Bushies have done, or of crossing other ethical lines. And reporters say other press shops--notably those of Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards--are also highly combative.)

So far, the strategy has worked brilliantly. In the current climate, where the mainstream media is under attack from both conservatives and liberals, Clinton may have picked the right moment to get tough with the press. But, as the murmur of discontent among the fourth estate grows--and Hillary's coverage has taken a sharper tone since a widely panned debate performance late last month--even some Hillary supporters fear that the strategy may produce a dangerous backlash.

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Most Democrats in Washington agree that, had John Kerry responded more effectively to conservative "Swift Boat" attacks about his war record in the summer of 2004, he would be president today. And, if the Clinton campaign is overzealous, some say, it's because they are determined to avoid the alternative. "There's a Swift Boat around every corner," says one Democratic operative close to the campaign. "We'll be damned if we're going to let that happen again." Almost as important--in the Democratic primaries, at least--it is determined to show that it won't let that happen again. "They've cultivated this attack-machine image because they think that Democrats want that," says one political reporter. "They're pandering to the bloggers." This approach isn't without risks, however. Some people say a central problem for Al Gore in 2000 was the way the reporters covering him resented the lack of access and information they were afforded and (allegedly) punished him with negative coverage. Among Hillary's supporters, there are already fears of a repeat. According to one person who was present, the subject arose in a recent conversation among a group of former Clinton hands and loyalists, who fretted that the campaign's short-term press management success isn't sustainable--that its brute propaganda mentality will eventually taint Hillary's coverage. Some Clinton supporters describe a gradually harder edge, as evidenced by her post- debate coverage. One veteran Democratic strategist agrees: "Don't you think they're on the brink [of a backlash]?"

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John Kerry would not have been president if he responded aggressively to the Swift boat ads because it would have demonstrated that he had been lying about his service record and his "Christmas in Cambodia." When the liberal media claims that the Sift boat ads were debunked they overlook the fact that the ads debunked many Kerry myths about his service including his bogus claim about spending Christmas in Cambodia. Also his claims about doing things in a Nixon administration that had not even taken office showed his penchant for making things up. However their most devastating ad was the one where they showed Kerry slandering the troops before a congressional committee. There could be no aggressive response that would make people forget that slander.

However, he is correct in pointing out that the Clinton camp is responding to the left's kook bloggers who want to see candidates be tough on the media, but not on the terrorist. I also thought his phrase "veteran Democratic media operative" contained several levels of redundancy.