A Tale of Two Young Senators
Actually, it’s more a tale of how the media responds to two young senators:
– Froma Harrop, Real Clear Politics, December 26, 2006.
- “Curious: What is Rand Paul’s foreign policy background? Did he serve in the military? Did he study, live, do business or charity overseas?”
– Terry Moran, ABC News, today.
As Joel Pollack of Big Journalism responds to Moran today, “You were an English major. What are you doing writing about foreign policy? Sauce, goose, gander.” **
And of course, the same question Moran asked about Sen. Paul could be asked about Sen. Obama in 2008 — and was; even after he was president-elect. Recall Tom Brokaw of NBC and Charlie Rose (then still PBS) pondering in mid-November of 2008 how interesting Mr. Obama was — even though we (Tom and Charlie) don’t know anything about him. And even though both men hold themselves out as journalists who work in buildings with offices full of reporters, editors, producers, and even Internet access to help research that question:
* Incidentally, note that at Real Clear Politics, six years after Froma Harrop’s “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing” piece in 2006, the mystery continues: “Even After 4 Years, Obama Remains a Mystery,” a headline there stated this past September. Curiously, journalists seemed to have finally understood his worldview pretty well by the time of his second inauguration.
** Note that one doesn’t even need to be an English major to be an on-air “journalist” at ABC and question powerful politicians, if your liberal credentials are sufficiently burnished ahead of time — and no, I’m not talking about George Stephanopoulos.
Related: From Stacy McCain: “Liberal Blogger: ‘How Dare You Smear Hillary by Quoting Her Accurately!’”
Hannah Arendt could not be reached for comment.
In mid-2011, Froma Harrop was busy excoriating the Tea Party as part of her “Restoring Civility” project (http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/05/hypocrisy-irony-and-the-new-civility/)
Wonder what the 2011 Froma would think of the 2006 Froma? Yeah, Obama was just a senator in 2006 and not the dreamy, 11-dimensional-chess master of the universe, a man whose flatulence even conveys wisdom, that he morphed into over the next two years, so she should cut herself a break.
Really, for a party that has fallen in rapturous love with not just identity politics but identity group politicians, for 2016 you’ve got Hillary and then, what? Joe Biden? Andrew Cuomo? Martin O’Malley? Hard to play up the historical first/special interest card for any of them, so it’s not going to be a huge shock to see the media really rally to Protect the Queen in a situation like this (and it won’t be any shock, either to see some big media writer in the next three years pen an updated version of the from beyond the grave endorsement of Ted Kennedy by Mary Jo Kopechne that a Boston Globe writer thought up. Just substitute Ambassador Stephens’ name for Mary Jo’s and Hillary’s name for Teddy’s).