Over at The Atlantic, the liberal columnist Peter Beinart hypothesized on Monday that the mainstream political press is ready to start idolizing President Barack Obama again.
While it is debatable as to whether they ever really stopped, Beinart suggests that the conditions are going to soon be such that the media will have little choice but to renew the overt and unmistakable practice of heaping unqualified praise on the president.
Beinart’s argument is threefold.
First, Obama has revived his support among Hispanics in the wake of his executive action on immigration, according to Pew Research Center and Gallup. “By signing a piece of paper and taking a trip to Las Vegas, Mr. Obama boosted his rating among Hispanics, who make up 14 percent of the adult population, by around 15 points,” wrote The New York Times analyst Nate Cohn. Furthermore, Cohn observed, this boost in support came amid little saturation media coverage of his announcement as it was immediately followed by the sensational unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Beinart presumes that the president’s political fortune is something the press will relish celebrating.
Second, the economy is gaining steam while gasoline prices are on the decline. “And given the role a strong economy played in buoying Bill Clinton’s approval ratings in the late 1990s, despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it’s quite possible that Obama’s will rise too, which will further fuel the journalistic perception that Obama is back,” Beinart writes.
Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, the 2016 presidential elections are approaching and the press will do Hillary Clinton a grave disservice if she is forced amid negative media coverage of Obama to routinely distance herself from the last 8 years of governance.
While Obama was certainly unpopular this fall in states like Kentucky, he remains quite popular among the liberal activists who play an outsized role in Democratic primaries. In fact, Obama retains a connection to many them that Hillary Clinton has never enjoyed. The closer she comes to the nomination, the more nostalgic some of those grassroots liberals will become about Obama. And this new context—Obama versus Hillary among Democratic activists—rather than Obama versus Alison Lundergan Grimes among Kentucky midterm voters—will cast him in a more favorable light. Just last week, in a slap at Clinton, 300 former Obama campaign staffers signed a letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run. In the year to come, there will be many more reminders that in 2008 Obama generated a passion among liberals that Hillary Clinton did not, and may still not. That storyline will make Obama look good.
This is perfectly reasonable analysis. Beinart may not realize it, but his observation is a searing indictment of the dominant culture inside America’s newsrooms. Save for his argument about economy, Beinart is accusing the press of actively seeking to advance political narratives favorable toward Democrats. Even if the president’s poll numbers do not rebound – a historically typical condition for second-term presidents – it’s not difficult to imagine the political media investigating why that is the case based in the presumption that it is irrational.
Unemployment is falling, and Gross Domestic Product is recovering, the media will note. Why isn’t Obama beloved again? Could it be (insert prejudice or grievance here)?
Beinart may not even know it, but his is among the most biting critiques of the press to come out of the left in years. If he does not recognize the corruption he has identified in the media, it is only because he welcomes its effect on American politics.
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