Prometheus 6

Being unapologetically racist or sexist is no longer acceptable in this country, at least in most settings. The social censure for being publicly racist, though, is well codified; the perpetrator must recant and repent, and may never completely eliminate the taint. There's also a pretty solid consensus on what's racist and what isn't [P6: I disagree...more accurately, there's a consensus on what is racist but not on how to establish it or what to do about it]. The views on sexism are less settled.

The Clintons' Beef With the Media
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, February 15, 2008; A21

Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators -- as Bill Clinton suggested but didn't quite come out and say in a radio interview Tuesday -- basically in the tank for Barack Obama?

"The political press has avowedly played a role in this election. I've never seen this before," the former president said. "They've been active participants in this election. . . . But I don't want to talk about the press. I want to talk about the people. That's what's wrong with this election, people trying to take this election away from the people."

Somewhere in there, if I'm not mistaken, he acknowledged that journalists are people, too, so I guess I should be thankful for that. And I should note that throughout the interview with Washington's WMAL, Bill Clinton was back in loose-cannon mode. He said Hillary Clinton "has been the underdog ever since Iowa," which is not true. To support that unsupportable assertion, he implied that the political establishment is opposed to his wife's candidacy, which is not true. And he claimed that "we've gotten plenty of delegates on a shoestring," which is true only if you don't count the more than $100 million the Clinton campaign has raised (and mostly spent).

The former president also explained some of the campaign's embarrassing losses by saying that caucuses "disproportionately favor upper-income voters," and said of those rich folks that they "don't really need a president but feel like they need a change." I don't recall traffic jams of chauffeured limousines around the caucus sites in Iowa, Maine and the other caucus states Clinton lost.

The theme of press bias, however, is woven through the Clinton campaign's narrative of the story thus far.