Author: Ellen

2/28/2014 | The New York Times

(Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2013 leaving the State Department, where news media coverage was generally favorable.)

WASHINGTON — Soon after Hillary Rodham Clinton left the State Department, her longtime spokesman talked wistfully about their paradise lost.

“We knew the golden age was coming to an end,” Philippe Reines said.

Mr. Reines was referring to the coverage Mrs. Clinton received from the State Department press corps — in his view, a substantive, high-minded and worldly lot who diligently covered her diplomatic travels and policy initiatives. They were, Mr. Reines explained, in sharp contrast to “the parallel press corps” of political reporters who have scrutinized Mrs. Clinton’s every utterance, scratched at any scent of scandal and speculated about her ambitions since she first refused to bake cookies.

As Mrs. Clinton has now moved back into that parallel universe ahead of a potential second presidential run in 2016, Mr. Reines and the other press operatives entrusted to guard her image remain armored and armed against a media they believe has it in for the former first lady. But some veterans of past Clinton campaigns think her bunker mentality toward the press is outdated, and that it is the couple’s own psychological baggage that could hurt her chances.

After all, Mrs. Clinton has simply outlasted many of her old combatants — real and imagined — from the media wars of the 1990s. In their place is a virtual clean slate of Clinton reporters whose formative experiences with her come from the last campaign or her time as a senator. Some of the babies ready to board the 2016 campaign bus were actually babies in the 1990s.

“I wasn’t politically engaged in that time,” said Ruby Cramer, a reporter who was in single digits at the time of the Whitewater scandal and who covers Mrs. Clinton for BuzzFeed, the attention-grabbing Web publication whose news operation was not yet conceived in 2008. She has written pieces surveying Mrs. Clinton’s support in Iowa and profiling her chief donors in California, but other than receiving warnings about the Clinton press operation, she said. “I don’t think I came with any baggage.”

Mrs. Clinton’s press strategy will have a critical bearing on her political fortunes, especially as she faces earlier and more extensive coverage than any potential candidate in history. Reporters at a raft of publications, including this one, are treating Mrs. Clinton as a beat, an exceptional development for an undeclared candidate two years out from an election.

How and if Mrs. Clinton engages that press offers the first hint of the tone her possible campaign could strike in 2016, and whether it would be different from the approach of 2008, 2006, 2000, 1996 and 1992.

Mrs. Clinton’s media skepticism is a longstanding condition. In 1995, Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary in Bill Clinton’s first presidential term, wrote about the first lady’s aversion to the national Washington media. That memo was among nearly 4,000 Clinton White House documents made public by the National Archives on Friday, the latest entry in a flurry of AOL-era flashbacks.

As a national figure for three decades, half of which has been spent representing or residing in the media capital of the world, Mrs. Clinton is encountering at least her third wave of political reporters. Through Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, the vast right-wing conspiracy, the Senate candidate carpetbagger era, the Suha Arafat kiss, the presidential flirtations and finally the 2008 campaign, she has developed and maintained an attitude skeptical of the press. (“HC says press has big egos and no brains,” Mrs. Clinton’s late friend Diane Blair wrote in her personal papers during the 1993 White House Travel Office scandal.)

Most reporters acknowledge that Mrs. Clinton’s perception of them as enemy combatants is not entirely irrational. But it is a view that has not always served her well.

In the 2008 presidential primaries, as Mrs. Clinton challenged an upstart media sweetheart, Barack Obama, many reporters in her press corps knew her primarily as the senator from New York and not the former first lady. Nonetheless, Mrs. Clinton kept those reporters at bay and failed to employ the charm offensive of which she is highly capable. Only on the eve of the disastrous Iowa caucuses, when relations between the campaign and reporters had already broken down, did she venture onto the press bus with coffee and bagels. “I didn’t want you to feel deprived,” she said during a visit that lasted one minute and 28 seconds. Hardly anyone ate a bagel.

Some Clinton veterans point out that while young reporters might not come into the campaign with chips on their shoulders, they often answer to editors who have their own Clinton histories.

“On one hand, you’ve got reporters in their early 20s whose direct experience watching her is as a largely praised secretary of state and a glass-ceiling shattering presidential candidate,” said Blake Zeff, a former spokesman for Mrs. Clinton who is now the political editor at Salon. “On the other, you have older editors who come at this with a much longer view, steeped in old fights dating back to the 1990s and the Senate.”

To the extent that Mrs. Clinton is following the old playbook of stiff-arming the media, so far it seems to be working out just fine. Polls show her as a prohibitive favorite — for now —and there is no candidate on the horizon who seems capable of generating the media heat Mr. Obama did. Mrs. Clinton’s presumed supremacy has generated a virtual cottage industry of Democratic press operatives working on speculation to boost Mrs. Clinton and police her coverage.

While some of those pro bono boosters have sought to woo new reporters on the Clinton beat, there is still built-in skepticism about the media’s intentions. “What’s the point?” said a former Clinton press operative about shifting to a strategy of greater engagement when interest in Mrs. Clinton is already so intense, and when any tiny error could be amplified.

Sometimes, Mrs. Clinton’s press handlers can seem more obsessed with the past and perceived institutional biases than the reporters covering her. The two veterans who essentially run the Clinton press operation — Matt McKenna, a Montana-based strategist employed by Mr. Clinton and his foundation, and Mr. Reines, who works for Mrs. Clinton — are both known to keep blacklists.

But it is Mr. Reines, varyingly caustic and charming, who is the ultimate Clinton survivalist and the operative who perhaps most embodies his boss’s tortured relationship with the press. He has resided in Hillaryland for almost his entire career and developed a less than favorable view of the political press, comparing it to the hungry T-rex in Jurassic Park. “If you stand still, it doesn’t notice you. But once you move even a little bit it’s on the scent and you can’t get rid of it,” he said.

Mr. Reines, who was sidelined for much of the 2008 campaign, benefited from his exile as he found himself well positioned to follow Mrs. Clinton to the State Department, where he traveled with her extensively and entered her inner orbit. He is now considered a Clinton lifer.

On Thursday on the enclosed rooftop of the W hotel, Mr. Reines arrived late to the book party for “HRC,” a new book that describes Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department in a mostly positive light. His mere presence was a reminder to the myriad reporters and pundits in the room of the Clinton press shop’s Golden Rule: “We treat others in the way they treat us.”

As reporters gravitated toward him, Mr. Reines laughed with one of the book’s authors and then sipped the evening’s signature champagne cocktail. It was called the State Secret.

3/1/2014 | The New York Times

WASHINGTON — OY. By the time the Bushes and Clintons are finished, they are going to make the Tudors and the Plantagenets look like pikers.

Before these two families release their death grip on the American electoral system, we’re going to have to watch Chelsea’s granddaughter try to knock off George P.’s grandson, Prescott Walker Bush II. Barack Obama, who once dreamed of being a transformational president, will turn out to be a mere hiccup in history, the interim guy who provided a tepid respite while Hillary and Jeb geared up to go at it.

Elections for president are supposed to make us feel young and excited, as if we’re getting a fresh start. That’s the way it was with J.F.K. and Obama and, even though he was turning 70 when he got inaugurated, Ronald Reagan.

But, as the Clinton library tardily disgorged 3,546 pages of official papers Friday — dredging up memories of a presidency that was eight years of turbulence held steady by a roaring economy and an incompetent opposition, a reign roiled by Hillarycare, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Webb Hubbell, Travelgate, Monica, impeachment, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Marc Rich — the looming prospect of another Clinton-Bush race makes us feel fatigued.

Our meritocratic society seems increasingly nepotistic and dynastic. There was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years straight. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’s comic masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted on Friday, “Who else is looking forward to potentially TEN more years of obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s past, present and future?”

The Clintons don’t get defeated. They get postponed.

Just as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged in Long Island on Monday, referring to his mom’s tart comment that “if we can’t find more than two or three families to run for higher office, that’s silly,” that “it’s an issue for sure.” He added, “It’s something that, if I run, I would have to overcome that. And so will Hillary, by the way. Let’s keep the same standards for everybody.”

We’ve arrived at the brave new world of 21st-century technology where robots are on track to be smarter than humans. Yet, politically, we keep traveling into the past. It won’t be long before we’ll turn on the TV and see Lanny Davis defending President Clinton (the next one) on some mishegoss or other.

When the Clintons lost to Obama, they simply turned Obama’s presidency into their runway. Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, and a passel of other former Obama aides, are now helping Hillary. And Bill is out being the campaigner-in-chief, keeping the Clinton allure on display in 2014.

The new cache of Clinton papers is benign — the press seems more enamored of speechwriters’ doodles than substance — but just reading through them is draining. There are reams of advice on how to steer health care, which must have filled the briefing binders Hillary famously carried. But did she absorb the lessons, given that health care failed because she refused to be flexible and make the sensible compromises suggested by her husband and allies? She’s always on listening tours, but is she hearing? As one White House health care aide advised in the new document dump, “We need to be seen as listening.”

Just as in the reminiscences compiled by Hillary’s late friend, Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas — some of which were printed in the Washington Free Beacon three weeks ago — the new papers reflect how entangled the Clintons’ public and private lives were in the White House.

In a 1995 memo, Lisa Caputo, the first lady’s press secretary, sees an opportunity for the upcoming re-election campaign by “throwing a big party” for the Clintons’ 20th wedding anniversary.

“We could give a wonderful photo spread to People magazine of photos from the party coupled with old photos of their honeymoon and of special moments for them over the past 20 years,” Caputo wrote, adding that they could turn it into “a nice mail piece later on.”

Both sets of papers are revealing on the never-ending herculean struggle about how to present Hillary to the world, how to turn her shifting hairstyles and personas into one authentic image.

“Be careful to ‘be real,’ ” media adviser Mandy Grunwald wrote to her before the launch of her listening tour at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. “You did this well in the Rather interview where you acknowledged that of course last year was rough. Once you agree with the audience’s/reporters’ reality like that, it gives you a lot of latitude to then say whatever you want.”

Grunwald advises the first lady to “look for opportunities for humor” and “Don’t be defensive.”

It’s hard to understand why so many calculations are needed to seem “real,” just as it’s hard to understand how Hillary veers from feminist positions to un-feminist ones.

In the Blair papers, Hillary’s private view of the Monica Lewinsky affair hewed closely to the lame rationales offered by Bill and his male friends.

“HRC insists, no matter what people say,” Blair said, after talking to Hillary on the phone, “it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex within any real meaning (standup, liedown, oral, etc.) of the term.” The president dallying with a 22-year-old intern was not “a power relationship” and certain kinds of sex don’t count?

Like her allies Sidney Blumenthal and Charlie Rangel, Hillary paints her husband’s mistress as an erotomaniac, just the way Clarence Thomas’s allies painted Anita Hill. A little nutty and a little slutty.

“It was a lapse,” Blair wrote, “but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control.”

The cascade of papers evoke Hillary’s stressful brawls — with her husband, the press, Congress and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. And they evoke the issue about her that is so troubling and hard to fathom. She is an immensely complex woman with two sides. She is the tireless and talented public servant. And she is the tired warrior who can be insecure and defensive, someone who has cleaved to a bunker mentality when she would have been better served getting out of her defensive crouch.

Talking to her pal Blair, Hillary had a lot of severe words for her “adversaries” in the press and the G.O.P. Blair also said Hillary was “furious” at Bill for “ruining himself and the presidency” by 1994.

Hillary may have had a point when she said in 1993, after criticism of the maladroit firing of the veteran White House travel office staff, that the press “has big egos and no brains.” But it speaks to her titanic battles and battle scars.

Hillary has spent so much time searching for the right identity, listening to others tell her who to be, resisting and following advice on being “real,” that it leaves us with the same question we had when she first came on the stage in 1992.

Who is she?

4/23/2010 | The New York Times

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” continues to take on a cable channel.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.

Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.

It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.

“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.

On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.

It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”

Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.

“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.

The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.

It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.

In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”

In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”

In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”

In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.

As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.

Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”

Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.

His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”

But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.

“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”

He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/television/24stewart.html?_r=0

A version of this article appeared in print on April 24, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.