The Deaning of Obama (Almost)

March 9th, 2008 Posted in Hillary, Obama, Of Interest

What’s happening to Obama in the press, incidentally, is remarkably similar to what happened to Howard Dean (with the exception that Obama is less vulnerable to negative coverage). Dean, like Obama, initially received positive press–not directly, but as a by-product of being acknowledged as a phenomenon. After this coverage peaked, there was a serious attempt to paint Dean as a kind of angry clown–most notably by Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times. There were probably a few factors at work in this coverage, including the fact that the Democratic establishment opposed Dean and reporters are naturally in bed with their establishment contacts–even if unconsciously.

And then there’s the natural tendency to de-mythologize what seems to be too good to be true, and to take down whatever challenges the status quo and its underlying cynicism (its “realism”). Dean and Obama are at first merely phenomena. They garner the respect of the press because the press respects big stories, and that’s what populists who come from nowhere are. At first. When that story gets old, we are left merely with a flawed human protagonist. He must be punished not just for being unable to sustain the sacred Story, but for challenging the cynical narrative that the Story must tell. The respect for the initial drama of the phenomena must not be mistaken for the elevation of its protagonist, the transcendence of the narrative itself. That would undermine a self-conception that the average reporter and pundit must protect: the identity of the muckraking truth-teller, the leveler, the one who reveals that nothing really stands up to “investigative journalism.” If the main character escapes the story, the storyteller is undermined.

This protection of this neutral-because-adversarial identity is ironically a way of preserving the adversary, and so preserving the status quo. While exploding myths may seem to reporters like an inevitable challenge to the establishment, it is merely a way of reinforcing it if everything dissolves, under the same indiscriminate scrutiny, into a homologous muck. That muck consists of “nothing really changes” and “everyone is motivated by power rather than good intentions.” If nothing really changes and power is primary, then all that is left for the pundits–the sifters of dirt–to do is stand in awe of power and dissect the strategies of its self-preservation. This is what press “neutrality” comes to mean: a failure to distinguish between good arguments and bad arguments, because everything must be given equal time as “spin”; and a failure to distinguish between sincerity and manipulation, because every character is just “spin” as well.

So the press must turn on Obama because not to do so undermines the entire premise of their approach to the world and especially politics; to the irrational and pseudo-analytical dime-novel drama that they seem to believe makes their chatter interesting (or “sells papers”).

I’m not claiming that there is a conscious anti-Obama conspiracy per se, just that there are a few natural impulses in the press, which are just extensions of human nature when left unchecked by a little thoughtfulness. Here are the commandments:

• Be the mechanism of entrenched power, the status quo, conventional wisdom, and cynical “realism”
• Create imaginary drama that titillates and flatters audiences by reaffirming this cynicism
• Take down the one you have sanctified (Obama is first a phenomenon and then the object of sacrifice, a la Frazier’s Golden Bough–the ritual sacrifice of the king or god, or anything that is anxiety-producing because its power is unconventional)

Hillary Clinton, incidentally, initially received bad press only insofar as her bizarre outbursts received airtime; that they didn’t work and seemed ridiculous to all made things “unfair”).