Sundance508
Gold Member
- May 24, 2016
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By Sam Smith
Because it controls its own medium and can revise history at will, one accessory after the fact in the Clinton scandals is almost certain to remain unscathed: the media. From the beginning, journalists created a fantasy portrait of Bill Clinton as a brilliant visionary, managerial superman, and charismatic leader. During the New Hampshire primary in 1992, the New Republic‘s Hendrik Hertzberg surveyed several dozen journalists and found that all of them, had they been New Hampshire voters, would have chosen Clinton. He suggested that, “the real reason members of the press like Clinton is simple, and surprisingly uncynical: they think he would make a very good, perhaps a great, president. Several told me they were convinced that Clinton is the most talented presidential candidate they have ever encountered, JFK included.”
Not only was there no substantive evidence for such a conclusion, there was plenty to suggest that Clinton was instead a politician of no fixed philosophical or moral address, a man who began with compromise and retreated from there, and a rampantly mundane governor. More importantly, he was known to be less than honest, a sexual predator, and hung out with some of the sleaziest types in his state.
Because it controls its own medium and can revise history at will, one accessory after the fact in the Clinton scandals is almost certain to remain unscathed: the media. From the beginning, journalists created a fantasy portrait of Bill Clinton as a brilliant visionary, managerial superman, and charismatic leader. During the New Hampshire primary in 1992, the New Republic‘s Hendrik Hertzberg surveyed several dozen journalists and found that all of them, had they been New Hampshire voters, would have chosen Clinton. He suggested that, “the real reason members of the press like Clinton is simple, and surprisingly uncynical: they think he would make a very good, perhaps a great, president. Several told me they were convinced that Clinton is the most talented presidential candidate they have ever encountered, JFK included.”
Not only was there no substantive evidence for such a conclusion, there was plenty to suggest that Clinton was instead a politician of no fixed philosophical or moral address, a man who began with compromise and retreated from there, and a rampantly mundane governor. More importantly, he was known to be less than honest, a sexual predator, and hung out with some of the sleaziest types in his state.