New Hampshire: Beating the Press by Kevin

Hillary Clinton is not my first choice for President. She is incrementalist, centrist, and hawkish by nature. I do not believe that any of those are good characteristics for this moment in time. She would make a perfectly good president because she is also smart, tough, and has a decent idea of how to achieve her admittedly limited goals. I think either Obama or Edwards would be better, possibly great, Presidents and so Hillary is a third option for me. But I did so love seeing her win last night. It is a direct repudiation of the mindless, sexist press narrative. And anytime we refuse to let the likes of Chris Matthews and Maureen Down choose our nominee for us we have achieved a small victory.

Clinton tearing up a bit in the middle of a long, hard fought campaign is a nothing story. Edwards — who should be ashamed of himself for his comments — is a nothing story. Almost every male presidential candidate of the last twenty years has done something similar and those events have been treated as the minor stories with perhaps a comment about how the man in question was “humane” or “moved”. This is what the press thought of Clinton’s crying:

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

Chris Matthews, already perhaps the most sexist mainstream pundit, was at turns gleeful and viciously contemptuous. CNN and MSNBC were almost joyous in their certainty that she was going to lose. The notion that Clinton should be pilloried for a bit if emotion on the campaign trail infuriates me. It shows both the sexism still rampant in the press corps and that childish, unprofessional, personality driven nonsense are all our political press seems to care about. This has been a stellar example of the terrible job our press does in covering politics. With its focus on trivia and personalities, with its mistaking high-school level jealousies and phobias for insight, with its insistence on substituting story lines for reporting, the political press in this country is an enormous threat to the health of our democracy. That so many Democrats rejected them and their preoccupations and biases tonight is a very good sign.

I don’t want Clinton to be the Democratic nominee, but today I am very, very happy she won last night.

UPDATE: Apparently, I may not be the only Democrat sickened by the press coverage.