Bunker Mentality

» TNR: Bunker Hillary (Michael Crowley)

This article is certainly sweet, beautiful music to my ears. Still, there's some quirks with Crowley's take. Namely this: "Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage." I must have been too busy catching up on all the latest news about Hillary's tipping habits in restaurants to have noticed such fawning coverage elsewhere. But I think that sentence says more about Crowley than it does about the reality of news coverage toward Hillary.

Among the better points that Crowley raises is whether this approach warrants an eventual backlash. A closer read might even beg the question of whether the Lewinski scandal would have even been public if it weren't for the secretiveness over Whitewater. It's just one theory out there, but mine is that I think it would have. One thing Hillary does identify properly is that there's never "enough" to give the media before they're suddenly content with you and you're left alone. As a public candidate in the limelight, you are merely a roadblock on any reporter's path to their 15 minutes of journalistic fame. And in order for them to get said 15 minutes, you simply must become a part of the pavement.

The belief that journalists will befriend you and be gentle with you in their coverage is, to the extent it's true, fleeting. There's a term I use to describe this and I can't repeat it in polite company - at least until I come up with a PG-13 description of it. I think the concern over any backlash is certainly warranted, but I think a better discussion to have is on the role of campaign press operation needs to take an overall combative approach. Personally, I'm of the opinion that any multi-person team needs to have a good cop and a bad cop. But that's just my answer to it all.

Read Crowley's piece. Then read Greg Sargent's take. The conclusion alone is worth echoing here:

With the Freak Show there's literally no room for error -- once a story gets written into the Freak Show's script there's no going back. So the idea is to move as quickly as possible to strangle these stories before the Freak Show gets a hold of them. This is what's largely driving Camp Hillary's aggressiveness with the press. No mystery here.

Oh, and the book, "The Way to Win" is also recommended in order to explain the "Freak Show" references.