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fpbI think it is not arguable that the media, not only in America but across the world, are very favourable to Senator Obama. I am beginning to wonder whether this really does him any good - in fact, if I were him, I would actually ask for less reverential coverage.
It is not only a matter of the reaction of opponents. Republicans expect it. By this time, the partisanship of the press and TV networks has gone past being a Republican talking point and become a joke. No Republican alive expects anything other than open or disguised hostility from the New York and Los Angeles Times or from CNN or ABC. Certainly, when such things come they rub salt into open wounds, remind many Republicans where their real opponents are, and strengthen a corporate spirit that depends in some parts from feeling persecuted. But these things are expected, and I imagine that both Obama and his supporters in the media discount them.
What they should consider is the effect they will have on the half of the Democratic Party that voted for Hillary Clinton. At the time when Hillary declared her campaign closed, I visited her website to see how her people felt about it. I have never seen anything like it, not in eight years online. It was, to begin with, the most enormous comments thread I ever saw - hundreds, maybe thousands - I lost count after a while - of people, practically all women, screaming their views online. And they were literally all of one mind. Now you know that that is something that practically never happens on the net. However much agreement there may be on a thread, sooner or later some contrary person appears and makes him/herself felt. It may be trolling, it may be sheer contrarianism, or it may be a principled objection to the views expressed; but a large comments thread never, in my experience, goes by without some contradiction. Not this one, though. Hundreds upon hundreds of response, all of one mind, indeed all of one tone: rage, loathing for Obama's people (a frequent topic was the quality of supporter that Obama drew, with horror stories of assault, sexism, car keyings, threats, insults, campaign materials destroyed, fraudulent behaviour), absolute refusal to do anything for him. The word that summed up the mood of thousands of Hillary supporters was: "NEVER!"
The inter-Democrat fight has been more divisive at the ground level, at the level of individual party supporters, than either the candidates or the media realized. This story took place too low for the media radar to pick it: the hatred between Obama and Clinton activists was about events too small, too local, perhaps too petty, for Washington DC journalists, concerned with debates and large-scale polls, to notice. But it happened. Hillary's supporters already carried a considerable sense of aggravation. As one of them said in an article I read somewhere, "Don't you know how it always happens, ladies? You spent most of your adult life working. You are at the heart of your office. You have made yourself the most competent person there. You confidently expect, and everyone agrees you deserve, promotion. And then in comes the handsome young Harvard graduate with his nice tie and his nice jacket, tall and neat with a 32-teeth smile, and charms the boss and gets your job. And everyone tells you that you have to grin and bear it - for the good of the company." Well grounded or not, this is a common enough feeling among professional women to resonate with hundreds of thousands of them. Every pro-Obama article in every newspaper in the country, however well grounded its reasoning, sounded to them exactly like those office whispers - "for the good of the company", for the good of the party. That is why hundreds of thousands of Hillary supporters completely shut their minds to the coming defeat, to the obvious mistakes of their candidate, to any evidence of fact. They had already placed the media, like Republicans, in the enemy camp, and simply did not believe them.
To this you have to add the culture-clash element. The average Hillary supporter, especially their female core, is older and more poised than the average Obama activist. They are women who have spent maybe twenty years working in office or business environment, learning, if they did not already have them, manners and a certain kind of calming routine in dealing with colleagues and competitors. Work environments cannot and do not cope with screaming matches and aggressive certainty of any sort. The kind of attitude that seems natural to the Kos Kidz, simple assurance that they are in the right and that they are the generation that will change the world - and therefore what they do is right and whoever opposes them needs to be steamrollered for the good of the planet - are, to them, incomprehensible and repulsive. Personal encounters have often been, not only bruising, but disgusting to them on a deeply personal level. They have felt treated, not as possible colleagues, but as scum. There is a sense of personal as well as group abuse there which is hard enough to make a man forget, let alone a woman. Mind you: I do not say that the Hillary supporters are guiltless and that Obamans do not have anything on their own side to complain about. What I am trying to set out is a purely subjective attitude that is widespread among the supporters of the losing candidate, and that stands like a wall between them and any effort to recruit them for the victor's next campaign.
And that being the case, I feel that many Hillary supporters, especially the core, the activists and party members, will be, if anything, further infuriated by the constant and uncritical pro-Obama tone of the media. The world the media describe will simply not be the one they experienced. Their grievance, far from being appeased, will be further hardened. And on election day, they may well decide to take their vengeance.
It is not only a matter of the reaction of opponents. Republicans expect it. By this time, the partisanship of the press and TV networks has gone past being a Republican talking point and become a joke. No Republican alive expects anything other than open or disguised hostility from the New York and Los Angeles Times or from CNN or ABC. Certainly, when such things come they rub salt into open wounds, remind many Republicans where their real opponents are, and strengthen a corporate spirit that depends in some parts from feeling persecuted. But these things are expected, and I imagine that both Obama and his supporters in the media discount them.
What they should consider is the effect they will have on the half of the Democratic Party that voted for Hillary Clinton. At the time when Hillary declared her campaign closed, I visited her website to see how her people felt about it. I have never seen anything like it, not in eight years online. It was, to begin with, the most enormous comments thread I ever saw - hundreds, maybe thousands - I lost count after a while - of people, practically all women, screaming their views online. And they were literally all of one mind. Now you know that that is something that practically never happens on the net. However much agreement there may be on a thread, sooner or later some contrary person appears and makes him/herself felt. It may be trolling, it may be sheer contrarianism, or it may be a principled objection to the views expressed; but a large comments thread never, in my experience, goes by without some contradiction. Not this one, though. Hundreds upon hundreds of response, all of one mind, indeed all of one tone: rage, loathing for Obama's people (a frequent topic was the quality of supporter that Obama drew, with horror stories of assault, sexism, car keyings, threats, insults, campaign materials destroyed, fraudulent behaviour), absolute refusal to do anything for him. The word that summed up the mood of thousands of Hillary supporters was: "NEVER!"
The inter-Democrat fight has been more divisive at the ground level, at the level of individual party supporters, than either the candidates or the media realized. This story took place too low for the media radar to pick it: the hatred between Obama and Clinton activists was about events too small, too local, perhaps too petty, for Washington DC journalists, concerned with debates and large-scale polls, to notice. But it happened. Hillary's supporters already carried a considerable sense of aggravation. As one of them said in an article I read somewhere, "Don't you know how it always happens, ladies? You spent most of your adult life working. You are at the heart of your office. You have made yourself the most competent person there. You confidently expect, and everyone agrees you deserve, promotion. And then in comes the handsome young Harvard graduate with his nice tie and his nice jacket, tall and neat with a 32-teeth smile, and charms the boss and gets your job. And everyone tells you that you have to grin and bear it - for the good of the company." Well grounded or not, this is a common enough feeling among professional women to resonate with hundreds of thousands of them. Every pro-Obama article in every newspaper in the country, however well grounded its reasoning, sounded to them exactly like those office whispers - "for the good of the company", for the good of the party. That is why hundreds of thousands of Hillary supporters completely shut their minds to the coming defeat, to the obvious mistakes of their candidate, to any evidence of fact. They had already placed the media, like Republicans, in the enemy camp, and simply did not believe them.
To this you have to add the culture-clash element. The average Hillary supporter, especially their female core, is older and more poised than the average Obama activist. They are women who have spent maybe twenty years working in office or business environment, learning, if they did not already have them, manners and a certain kind of calming routine in dealing with colleagues and competitors. Work environments cannot and do not cope with screaming matches and aggressive certainty of any sort. The kind of attitude that seems natural to the Kos Kidz, simple assurance that they are in the right and that they are the generation that will change the world - and therefore what they do is right and whoever opposes them needs to be steamrollered for the good of the planet - are, to them, incomprehensible and repulsive. Personal encounters have often been, not only bruising, but disgusting to them on a deeply personal level. They have felt treated, not as possible colleagues, but as scum. There is a sense of personal as well as group abuse there which is hard enough to make a man forget, let alone a woman. Mind you: I do not say that the Hillary supporters are guiltless and that Obamans do not have anything on their own side to complain about. What I am trying to set out is a purely subjective attitude that is widespread among the supporters of the losing candidate, and that stands like a wall between them and any effort to recruit them for the victor's next campaign.
And that being the case, I feel that many Hillary supporters, especially the core, the activists and party members, will be, if anything, further infuriated by the constant and uncritical pro-Obama tone of the media. The world the media describe will simply not be the one they experienced. Their grievance, far from being appeased, will be further hardened. And on election day, they may well decide to take their vengeance.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 05:20 pm (UTC)There's a school of thought that the long Democratic campaign set the party up for a strong showing in the general election: widespread registration of Democrats in states that don't usually get the party's full attention. I don't have any numbers handy, and they'd probably be pre-spun anyway.
But, in the long run, I think any self-identifying Democrat will look at recent history and certain predictable elements in the future (like the aging liberal justices on the Supreme Court) and decide that this is too important an election to sit out.
[edited for splleing]
two cents from the south
Date: 2008-07-24 11:36 pm (UTC)Obama has a lot to fear from the Democratic old guard. They may not be wild at all about the war or the economy or our perceived standing in the world, but they do tend to think that older and wiser is a more prudent course in these times than youthful exuberance and ambition. Many of them recall what the Baby Boomers promised and aren't very happy with how that turned out (in their eyes.)
Re: two cents from the south
Date: 2008-07-25 04:25 am (UTC)I don't think South Carolina has gone Democratic in a Presidential election in more than 30 years, so my first guess is that the sample is far from typical.
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Date: 2008-07-28 06:22 am (UTC)Other, admittedly more partisan, sources, tell the same story. In The New York Times alone, of the 90 Obama stories running between June 4 and July 5, 40 were positive and only 13 negative, as noted by NewsBusters’ Times Watch. In contrast, only 9 of the 57 McCain stories appearing during the same period were positive, while 24 were negative. Journalists even favor Obama when it comes to campaign contributions – by a remarkable 20-to-1 margin, according to an analysis in Investors’ Business Daily.