Ed, gotta disagree with you here.

You never know what the Ah Ha! moment is going to be – that moment that caputres the public imagination and causes them to finally realize that the President is an elitist fraud.

Think about how much political trouble Bush 41 got in over a supermarket scanner or Bush 43 a “Mission Accomplished” banner?

Little moments like these can loom large, and the press is yet again protecting Obama from something with some degree of blowback potential.

Nat Hound on May 6, 2009 at 10:20 AM

The relevant comparison is Obama’s mustard vs. Bush 41’s scanner. From a Jonah Goldberg 2008 NRO Post, starting with a quote from Howie Kurtz:

It was a fresh demonstration of how a single, hazy anecdote — Jimmy Carter’s “killer rabbit” comes to mind — can suddenly become larger than life when it seems to match the public perception of a prominent figure.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called the story “totally media-manufactured,” saying Bush had actually been impressed by more advanced scanner technology. “In hindsight, I probably should’ve done a better job of saying how new some of this stuff was,” McDonald says.

Time magazine’s Michael Duffy, another pool member, called the incident “completely insignificant as a news event. It was prosaic, polite talk, and Bush is expert at that. If anything, he was bored.”

Philip Taubman, the Times’ deputy Washington editor, says that “we stand by the original story, as the piece last week makes clear.” He calls Rosenthal’s reliance on the pool report “routine” for White House coverage.

The incident has spurred talk that the White House may be trying to keep pool reporters out of earshot during campaign events. In New Hampshire last week, Rosenthal says, a Bush advance man told him: “You can explain to your colleagues why they’re going to be kept 50 yards away from the president from now on.”

Bush campaign spokeswoman Victoria Clarke dismisses the remark as “a joke,” saying, “We think the president is good at mixing with people and we’d like the reporters as up close and personal as possible.”

Me: Now, the basic issue is this: Do you believe the New York Times — which was viciously and abjectly anti-Bush back then, unlike now when they’re so even handed — or do you believe all the other members of the press pool, including the author of the report himself?

And let’s not forget commonsense. To wit: So what if it wasn’t new technology? Poppa Bush was a famously polite politician. He was at a routine trade show/political event, where his hosts were proud of something or other. Bush acted impressed, as any good politician would. The logic of the Times seems to be that he should have yawned to prove he was in touch with the common man.

Anyway, The New York Times — which had no reporter at the scene — took it upon itself to offer a politically devastating misinterpretation unsupported by any participants or witnesses and nearly two decades later Democrats are still dishonestly using this story to prove, well, whatever they want.

This is why Obama’s mustard matters. Because if a Republican ordered it, they would smear him or her with it (Ha!) for decades.

Media bias isn’t just big-ticket things, it’s little things, too.

Nat Hound on May 6, 2009 at 10:34 AM