Spin Cycle

The Clinton press folks have been saying for months that they receive far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama, and Howie Kurtz has his suitably sweeping take on that in today's Washington Post. The piece hits all the points you'd expect -- her dip in the polls, for instance, was widely portrayed as a plunge, which it ain't.

Kurtz makes a convincing argument for the existence of a double-standard in the coverage (rooted in gender?). Clinton gets attacked for attacking, he suggests, while Obama got a free pass during 10 months of relentless, if decorous negativity.

Valid points, all. Kurtz glosses over the self-fulfilling prophecy angle , hammered by TNR’s Michael Crowley, who claims Clinton’s decades-old paranoia about the press creates animus that boomerangs on the candidate. (The flip side, of course, is that Obama’s press people cleverly play good cop with reporters to accentuate the contrast.)

The thing that really stuck out in Kurtz’s column was this utterly amazing assertion by Time.com’s Meta-Man Mark Halperin: “Your typical reporter has a thinly disguised preference that Barack Obama be the nominee. The narrative of him beating her is better than her beating him, in part because she's a Clinton and in part because he's a young African American. . . . There's no one rooting for her to come back.”

Really? Who’s the “typical reporter?”

As a card-carrying Typical who spends more time with Hillary Rodham Clinton than his family, I have never heard a print or broadcast reporter in the trenches express a preference for Obama, overt, thinly or thickly disguised or otherwise. (Anybody else notice that the rules for quoting anonymous reporters are even looser than the rules for blind-quoting political operatives?)

The assertion that “There's no one rooting for her to come back” is simply off-base. When Newsday wrote about the Hillary-Rudy fade earlier this month, a couple of NYC-based reporters called us to joke about how “screwed” the city media would be if Hillary and Rudy tanked.

To his credit, Halperin focuses on “storyline” and not any baked-in anti-Hillary media bias. In the summer, when fewer people were paying attention, the zeitgeist was all about a Clinton blow-out and it was nearly impossible to dent her armor no matter how damaging the revelation (Exhibit A: The non-existent impact of the Norman Hsu scandal). Now, the pack is devouring the red meat of “Is This the End?”

So, the seminal question is more political than journalistic: Can Hillary create a new storyline? If we’re writing about “The Comeback Kid II” in two weeks, chances are she wins.

UPDATE: Ben Smith weighs in with an interesting point : that Chicago-land stories on Obama 's odd real estate dealings, which the Clintons say has been underplayed, have been too LOCAL to appeal to the national pack and therefore don't "have the same array of Beltway forces driving it."

Counter question: Was Whitewater any less parochial?

Counter, counter-question, courtesy John Riley: Wasn't Whitewater only a national issue AFTER the 1992 campaign?

--Glenn Thrush