Bush And Clinton
Douglas Turner contrasts the press’ treatment of President Bush with its treatment of Bill Clinton when he was president:
Democrats in Congress, and Bush-bashing reporters, groped and scratched for any way they could – mostly below the belt – to take the political edge off an inspired and successful way for the president to say finis to a controversial war.Almost nobody complained when President Clinton took his ethereal moonwalk for photographers on the beach at Normandy in 1994 – finding pebbles to make a cross in the sand.
Nor when Vice President Al Gore mugged for the camera with sailors’ kids at the Norfolk Naval Base at Christmastime 1998, when Clinton was facing his impeachment trial.
Nor when Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea visited Bethlehem, and toured the Church of the Nativity that same month in a religious photo opportunity and bid for political sympathy as he faced possible ouster by the Senate.
But questions about the legitimacy, cost and appropriateness of the Clinton-Gore travels and photo-ops were strictly off-limits in the 1990s. The extreme media deference accorded the Democratic White House was self-imposed by a severely co-opted White House press corps. In those days, reporters whose questions cut too close to the Clinton bone were routinely and loudly rebuked by colleagues, even on the way out of the East Room after a news conference.
Clinton partisans in this business harbored little shame about their bias, correcting colleagues who leaned on then-press secretary Mike McCurry for straight answers. “Mike’s a really nice guy,” I was informed by a gushing reporter from the Midwest after I asked McCurry for Clinton’s health records. I didn’t get them.
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