Even Conservative Media Chorus Sings Obama's Praises
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010702939.html
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; C01
Barack Obama, now the media's odds-on favorite to win the White House,
is drawing effusive praise from the chattering classes.
"You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. . . . This
is a huge moment," one commentator wrote.
An unreconstructed liberal? An African American hungering for a racial
breakthrough? No, it was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times
columnist, and he's got plenty of company on the right.
The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which
normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come
away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the
Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A
Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome
and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd
while seeming to stay slightly above it." The journalistic scrutiny
usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something
akin to a standing ovation.
What's more, the applause extends even to pundits on the right, many of
whom routinely denigrate Democratic politicians and yet are strikingly
warm toward Obama. There is gratitude, to be sure, that he seems poised
to knock off their longtime bete noire, Hillary Clinton -- especially if
he wins today's New Hampshire primary -- but also admiration for his
inclusive approach to politics and for his sheer talent.
"Who's not proud of this kid?" says Amanda Carpenter, national political
reporter for the conservative site Townhall.com. "He has a story people
feel good about."
In the wake of Obama's remarks about unity on the night of his Iowa
caucus victory Thursday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican
congressman and self-described conservative, called it "one of the most
remarkable speeches I've ever seen."
Bill Bennett, the conservative author, said on CNN that it was a
"remarkable breakthrough" for "Barack Hussein Obama, a black man," to
win in a "rural, white farming state." Rush Limbaugh added his voice on
the radio, saying that Obama and Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner in
Iowa, "had really uplifting, inspirational speeches."
The Weekly Standard called Obama "the classiest candidate on the
Democratic side." Peggy Noonan, the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter,
wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Obama had won "with a classy
campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said
every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change
that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it
forward together."
What explains these cross-party kudos?
"There's clearly a matter of heart going on here," Bennett says after
his morning radio show. "He's a cool guy, a handsome guy, has a fabulous
voice. A leading Democratic candidate, a black man in America, and he
does not talk about race, does not play the race card. It appeals to the
better angels of all our natures."
Scarborough dismisses the notion that some conservatives are talking up
Obama in the belief that he would be a weak general-election opponent.
"I get e-mails from Republicans, who've never voted for a Democrat
before, saying they were tearing up during his Iowa speech," he says
from New Hampshire. "I don't think they're being calculated and cynical.
This is so damn great for America."
The story line -- "a biracial kid with an absentee father whose
improbable path carried him from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago to
Washington," as Newsweek put it -- has a movie-of-the-week quality for
news outlets. The New York Post's headline screamer yesterday, over a
picture of Clinton, was "PANIC." By contrast, the Boston Herald's front
page blared: "BARACK STAR."
Few liberal columnists are shedding tears over the difficulties of
Clinton, who has no natural cheering section in the press. And African
American writers -- The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote that
Obama's speech gave him "goose bumps" -- are understandably excited.
Not all conservatives have hitched a ride on the Barackwagon. "There's a
lot about the Obama movement I find offensive," says National Review
Editor Rich Lowry, who predicted two months ago that his campaign was
going "nowhere." "There's a messianism -- 'I embody change' -- that if a
Christian conservative was saying those things, people would be scared."
But even as a "self-absorbed" Obama spouts "airy cliches," Lowry says,
he found himself standing on tiptoe at a recent Obama speech. "It's
really something magical," he says. "You're almost not an American if
you don't feel stirred by what his victory would represent symbolically.
Here's a guy who 50 years ago couldn't have gone in certain restrooms
and motels."
Obama's conciliatory tone may also be a factor. He speaks of
transcending red and blue states with a coalition that includes
Republicans and independents, while Clinton, who has been hammered by
the right since her husband's 1992 campaign, boasts about battling the
"Republican attack machine."
Some major conservative voices have paid only fleeting attention to
Obama -- Fox's Bill O'Reilly says he "ran an excellent campaign in Iowa"
and is "very charismatic" -- because they are more engaged in relishing
Clinton's defeat. The Standard's cover story this week, with a shot of
Bill and Hillary, is "The Fall of the House of Clinton." But that means
Obama has been spared, at least for now, the kind of frontal assault
that might otherwise greet a surging liberal Democrat.
For some conservative commentators, Obama, 46, embodies the turning of a
different kind of page, as the candidate himself has argued. In an
Atlantic cover story last month, right-leaning blogger Andrew Sullivan
called Obama's candidacy "a potentially transformational one. Unlike any
of the other candidates, he could take America -- finally -- past the
debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom
generation that has long engulfed all of us."
Even Huckabee, in ABC's Republican debate Saturday, acknowledged: "We
have to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is touch at the core
of something Americans want. . . . He has excited a lot of voters in
this country. Let's pay respect for that."
Many journalists have a personal fondness for John McCain, who holds a
narrow lead in the polls for New Hampshire's Republican primary, based
on his round-the-clock accessibility going back to their rides on the
Straight Talk Express in 1999 and 2000. Obama has few such relationships
with national reporters, who are more in the role of passive observers
of a stellar performer.
Politico columnist Roger Simon, in New Hampshire last weekend,
contrasted "a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech" by Obama, who
offered few specifics, with an event in which "Clinton talked about
issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail" while part of the
audience filtered out.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the conservative media are not
likely to urge his election by acclamation. There will be plenty of
emphasis on his liberal positions and, in an echo of Clinton's
criticism, his lack of national experience.
"This is a guy probably to the left of Hillary," Bennett says.
"Do I think he's right on the issues? No," Carpenter says. "But there's
a perception you can work with him."
Lowry sees Obama as an elusive target: "No one's really got anything on
him because he hasn't really done anything yet. He doesn't have any
battle scars. You can blast Obama for what I'd consider an outrageous
left-wing statement and it just doesn't get conservatives charged up the
way blasting Hillary does."
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