December 14, 2007
Back Talk IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes some good explanations for why confronting the media can backfire. “My first and perhaps unthinking response,” he writes, “is that nowadays the press often sticks together and holds grudges, while very sustained attacks on some politicians can go unchallenged by what would once have been the faction of the press nominally favoring their own side.” I think this is definitely part of the reason why press-bashing can hurt candidates. In my previous post, I described the way Hillary Clinton’s evasiveness has recently begun to undermine her campaign. Her tendency toward obfuscation was bound to cause some self-inflicted damage at some point, but I doubt the damage would have been quite so severe if her campaign hadn’t treated the media with such unremitting hostility. After months of getting stonewalled, misled, and insulted, reporters finally saw Clinton bleeding, and they jumped all over the story. I’d offer another partial explanation, though, for why candidates harm themselves by attacking the press. Sometimes, as in Ronald Reagan’s case, candidates go at their journalistic interrogators because they are getting treated badly. But in other cases, candidates knock the media because they don’t want to give honest answers to fair questions (again, see: Clinton, Hillary). When this happens, the public is often smart enough to see what’s really going on. When a candidate acts slippery or mean, voters can tell—even without the help of a grudge-holding press. Voters can distinguish between fair treatment and unfair treatment, and when candidates respond resentfully to reasonable questions, they don’t like it. I’ll add that candidates can respond to unfair treatment in more than one way, and the best way to swat away a nasty question isn’t always to get nasty back. For evidence of this, I offer this clip of Christopher Dodd speaking in yesterday’s Democratic debate. Dodd was asked, bizarrely, whether his run for president was motivated by a desire to clear his family name, which the moderator said was tarnished by his father’s 1967 censure in the Senate. This was a totally unfair question, based on cheap armchair psychoanalysis of the candidate. Dodd’s response, however, was graceful and direct, and it garnered the applause of the audience and his fellow candidates. If Dodd had trashed the moderator, he would have been justified in doing so, but he would not have demonstrated the same kind of maturity and decency he showed yesterday.
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