Linda Chavez posted a thoughtful essay over at RealClearPolitics yesterday comparing the way the press has treated Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. “The biggest story to emerge from the Republican National Convention,” she wrote in “The Unexamined Life,” “was the media’s effort to destroy Gov. Sarah Palin.”
So far, that effort has failed, indeed backfired spectacularly. Let me count the ways. Most voters think it is pretty poor form for the media to mount a full-court-press “investigative journalist” “the-public-has-a-right-to-know” strike against Palin’s 17-year-old daughter. Most people think that there are limits to that sort of thing and that there are plenty of cases–this being one–where the children of candidates have the public’s right to No. Then there is the penumbra of vitriolic hatred from the Left that surrounded the media’s feeding frenzy. Mark Steyn published a memorable example over at NRO from a chap in Shelton, Washington:
This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains. And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed.
The answer to that last question, I’d guess, is No, but I reckon that is immaterial. He wasn’t writing for information. He was writing to make a point and communicate an emotion, both of which he did with what you might call hermeneutical transparency. You know where you stand with Anonymous from Shelton, Washington, which is a start.
Chavez documents more of the same and wonders–in approximately the same rhetorical sense as Mark Steyn’s correspondent–why the media, which has lavished such intense personal curiosity on Palin, her husband, and her children, has displayed such reticence about Barck Obama’s past. The fact that Mr. Palin was cited for DUI in 1986 is dragged out and displayed as evidence of grievous moral failing and, by implication, the political unworthiness of his wife. But what about Obama’s drug use? In his memoir, Obama acknowledges that, as a teenager, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and “maybe a little blow when you could afford it.” But why hasn’t that admission been followed up on by the bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate? What if it came to light that Sarah Palin had used “maybe a little” cocaine some time in her past? Do you think the press would erect a discreet border labeled noli me tangere around the issue as they have done for Obama? Fat chance.
Chavez ends her post with the observation that “it will be a test of the media’s integrity to see if they devote as much time delving into Sen. Obama’s drug use as they did into Bristol Palin’s sex life.” Personally, I believe that the full story of Obama’s relations with folks like Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright is likely to be far more troubling than his teenage (but was it only teenage?) use of drugs. But we’re unlikely to get to the bottom of all that before the election unless Stanley Kurtz has some rapid breakthroughs, which he might. Even then, though, one wonders what the media at large would make of the revelations.
Perhaps the most revealing item in Chavez’s post, however, came from Obama himself. The fact of the media’s love affair with “the one we’ve been waiting for” is by now an established given. But why? What is it about Obama that has so captivated the media? Why, for example, do they not take a more robust interest in finding out and reporting on who he is, where he has come from, what he has said and done? A large part of the answer, I suspect, lies in Barack Obama’s possession of what I think of as the Higher Oleaginousness. To my mind, it’s his most conspicuous gift. Recalling in his memoir how he dealt with his mother when she confronted him about drug and alcohol use in high school, he confides a bit about his methods: “I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”
It worked on Mrs. Obama. It worked on the mainstream media. How much longer will it work on the voting public? We’ll soon have a chance to find out.
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