What's With the Media Coverage of Hillary's Campaign?
I voted for Edwards yesterday but now I'm rooting for Hillary. The reason is simple -- media coverage of her campaign.
If there was any "message" for me in yesterday's primary results, it was the shrill chorus of media talking heads crowing that Hillary's campaign was dead after Iowa. That seemed to be the consensus on TV, in newspapers and on the radio. Early last night, Chris Matthews of MSNBC was practically frothing at the mouth at the notion that Clinton could lose New Hampshire. He was a little more subdued as the night wore on. Tom Brokaw chided him at one point by saying "this is one of the great triumphs of American presidential politics and the rest of us who were saying out loud that this was not going to happen, we've got a lot of explaining to do." And Fox News, hardly an unbiased news organization, was predicting at 6:30 p.m. that Hillary's campaign needed major re-hauling -- hours before the polls were closed!
Even the party "establishment" seems eager to bash her. A relative of mine, a Washington lobbyist, called over the weekend to find out what "was happening in NH." She told me, in no uncertain terms, that no woman my age was supporting Hillary and that she had too much baggage to win the primary, much less succeed in the general election. This coming from a 60-year-old woman who's a straight-ticket Democrat living within the Washington beltway.
Well, I'm over 40, female and I'm cheering Hillary on, not because she cried -- give me a break! -- but because she's a woman, she's powerful and she isn't afraid to admit it. Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. Magazine, had an op-ed piece in this week's New York Times entitled "Women are Never Front-Runners." In it, she pointed out that a woman with Obama's résumé would never have become a U.S. senator, let alone a viable candidate for president; that black men got the right to vote 50 years before women did, and that Obama "is seen as unifying by his race while [Clinton] is seen as divisive by her sex," that "she is accused of 'playing the gender card' when citing the old boys' club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations."
Steinem is right. Her piece is the one media story that, if I'd read it before the primary, would've made me change my vote.