Clinton and Obama: Media Hype and Reality
by Stephen Berk

If you are trying to learn who Senators Clinton and Obama really are and what they advocate from watching televised debates or the news stations, or listening to talk radio, you might as well be trying to learn something about Paleolithic humans from watching the Flintstones.  Today’s corporate media make little pretense at objectivity, nor do they try to be informative.  Their prime stock in trade is negative labeling, gossip mongering and gotcha hit pieces.  Instead of explaining or critiquing candidates’ positions on the many crucial issues of our day, much of what passes for journalism is preoccupied with hurling insults or fixing unflattering images on the candidates.                                                   

Much of media is now owned by a few corporations which blatantly favor the GOP.  Hence most character assassination is directed at Democratic candidates and not at their Republican opponents.  In 2000 George Bush’s habitual lack of knowledge on the issues and his mangling of the English language received scant criticism in the mainstream press.  Bush’s ignorance was spun to make him into an affable American everyman, a folksy down home guy who would love nothing more than to tip a cold one with you at the neighborhood pub.  Al Gore, on the other hand was attacked for being stiff, stretching the truth, and believe it or not, sighing in one of the debates.  He was portrayed as having too much “gravitas” (intellectual depth is always a liability in the American idiocracy).  Four years later John Kerry was billed as a haughty, remote patrician, made even richer and less sympathetic to the average American by his wife’s Heinz ketchup fortune.  Such judgments are never leveled at the Bush family fortune and international web of elite connection which has made W one of the most privileged men ever to hold office in America.                                                                                                 

In the present campaign marathon, it is Barack Obama who has inherited Gore’s and Kerry’s “elitist” label. Raised in modest circumstances by grandparents and a single mother, Obama is often derided as an Ivy League snob as if he spent his youth playing polo on the family estate.  But John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, who divorced his wife to marry an heiress, is portrayed as the straight talking good old boy.

If Obama makes a misstatement in the process of nonstop year long campaigning, he undergoes relentless personal attack, whereas when McCain makes one, he gets a pass. 

Recently McCain said that Iran is harboring al Qaeda operatives and equipping them with bombs to attack inside Iraq.  This was such a blatant distortion that supporter Joe Lieberman, who was accompanying McCain, had to correct him.  The incident received virtually no attention.  Obama, however, has been on the receiving end of a months’ long media conniption.

First was the flap over remarks made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, respected senior minister of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, which Obama attends. Wright was denouncing America in the same kind of language that Hebrew prophets denounced the ancient state of Israel, and for some of the same reasons, chiefly oppression of the poor and marginalized.  First media hyenas ripped Wright’s statements out of context.  They could have tried to educate themselves and the public about African American preaching, whose impassioned style and liberation content goes back to slavery days.  But their purpose was to inflame, so they caricatured Wright as an incendiary, anti-American black radical.  Then in good Joe McCarthy style they tarred Obama with guilt by association.

Next came Obama’s out loud speculation about the causes of rural working class conservative voting patterns.  He connected the tendency to dwell on issues of religion and guns with bitterness due to economic loss.  The statement was generally inaccurate, as Obama later admitted.  But media attack dogs pounced on it and used it to label him an out of touch elitist.  Maureen Dowd played the anti-intellectual card, labeling him with the fifties epithet, “egghead,” and connecting him to “Adelaide” (Adlai) Stevenson, implying that Obama and Stevenson (one of the most respected statesmen of his era) were both effeminate Ivy League snobs and not real red blooded American men.  Neo-conservative Bill Kristol not only accused Obama of elitism, but using another McCarthy technique, accused him of Marxism because he reduced people’s faith oriented politics to their economic frustrations.  This after Kristol had impugned Obama’s patriotism because he does not wear an American flag lapel pin.  In fact it was traditionally totalitarians, Nazi and Soviet leaders, who generally wore flag pins, not Americans.

Mainstream media attention to Hillary Clinton has been if anything even more relentlessly negative. When Clinton says that she has more experience than Obama, she is often referring to experience in parrying the steady stream of insults and slanderous attacks of media character assassins.  These go back to the early years of her husband’s administration and are too numerous to mention.  But much of the negative attitude toward Mrs. Clinton in the press is of sexist origin.  From the time that Bill Clinton attained the presidency in 1992, she was attacked for having her own strongly independent identity.  She had been an achiever with a celebrated legal career and long time involvement in child advocacy, with groups like the Children’s Defense Fund.  This career identity apart from her husband’s along with a reputation for outspokenness, placed her outside the ceremonial role customarily reserved for first ladies.  Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Hillary strongly identified while in the White House, had also been attacked in the press for similar outspokenness, involvement in policy making and refusal to melt into the background of her husband’s administration. A great many Americans still harbor a fear and distrust of powerful, assertive women, and this often comes out as misogyny.  Bill Moyers recently devoted a lengthy segment of his PBS program to discussion of the amount and degree of misogynistic attacks on Senator Clinton in print, on broadcast media and on the Internet.  Many of the Internet sources are full of vitriolic and even pornographic invective. The Seattle Times quotes conservative MSNBC talk show host Tucker Carlson as saying, “There’s just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary.”  Radio talker and Republican insider Rush Limbaugh jokes on air about Hillary’s “testicle lock box.”  This kind of talk intentionally sets damaging negatives in people’s minds about a leading Democratic candidate.                                                                                                                                 

In order for our votes to have any meaning, we need to step away from this politics of personal attack and look at who Clinton and Obama really are and what they really stand for.  The Internet has a number of excellent compendia of candidates’ voting records and position papers.  One of the best is www.votesmart.org.  These candidates are two of the best educated, most articulate people in American public life.  Both have written a number of books about their lives and their views of public issues.  Clinton’s autobiographical work is called Living History. It was published in 2003, during her first term in the Senate. During her years as first lady, she published It Takes a Village, on the community support systems children need in order to grow up healthily. Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father came out in 1995, while he was practicing civil rights law and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.  In 2006 he published The Audacity of Hope, which details his thesis that American politics has foundered on the shoals of blind and bitter partisanship. His fundamental project is to put together a new consensus by drawing upon what has been most inspiring and serviceable in the American tradition.  In the remainder of this article I will sketch highlights on the background and politics of Senators Clinton and Obama.                                                                                                                       

Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, the oldest of three children. The family lived in Park Ridge, Illinois, a middle class suburb of Chicago. Her father, Hugh Rodham was the son of a factory worker from Scranton, Pennsylvania and a self made small businessman.  He was remote and hypercritical towards both his wife and children.  Hillary received her chief emotional support from her mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham. Hugh’s conservative opinions influenced Hillary as a youth, and in 1964 she worked as a Goldwater girl.  At the same time there were other more liberal influences on her. As a young child Hillary absorbed her mother’s Methodist Christianity.  Methodism has a strongly ethical orientation which stresses lifting up the downtrodden.  In high school Hillary became friends with youth minister Don Jones, who became her abiding friend and correspondent.  Jones exposed her to social justice theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred leader of the German Lutherans who resisted Hitler, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who questioned whether God was on the side of America in the Cold War. Jones also raised Hillary’s awareness of the civil rights struggle by taking her to hear Martin Luther King speak.  King so moved her that she promised herself she would devote a major part of her life to public service.  Her involvement in child advocacy grew out of that commitment.                                                                                            

Conservative and liberal strands of influence remain evident in Senator Clinton, the former in her emphasis on military strength and an often interventionist foreign policy.  In 1998 she urged her husband to bomb Serbia to stop its aggression against Albanians in its Kosovo province, and in 2002 she voted to give President Bush what became congressional authorization for the war with Iraq. She is proud of being New York’s first senator to sit on the Armed Services committee, where she advocates for expanding the size of the Army.  She also, however, pays close attention to the Bush Administration’s shortchanging of veterans needs and has introduced legislation to increase their allocation. She continues her work for children in authoring the Children’s Health Insurance Program and campaigning for its expansion in the face of a Bush veto. She also ferried a bill through the Senate to facilitate easier adoptions for foster children whose eligibility has run out.    

Barack Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii of mixed race parentage, his father, Barack, Sr., an African from Kenya, his mother, Ann Dunham a white American from Kansas. They met and married while studying at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center. Barack, Sr. left Hawaii in 1963 to do doctoral work at Harvard. Bringing his family with him became problematic, and the marriage did not survive. Hence young Obama grew up without his father.  Ann remarried, an Indonesian, also a student at the East-West Center, and in 1967 the family moved to Jakarta, where Barry, as he was called then, was schooled until age ten, when he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.  Barack, Sr. returned to Kenya, where he was killed in an automobile accident, thus sealing the possibility of his son’s ever coming to know him.  This left Barry with a longing for his father and a need to become acquainted with his African heritage.

In 1983, after graduating from Columbia University, he moved to Chicago’s historically black South side to do community organizing.  Living and working in this context, he felt, as he puts it, “drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change.”  It was then that he joined Trinity United Church of Christ, a large congregation with a host of social action programs.  This was also the time when Obama journeyed to Kenya, making a pilgrimage to the graves of his father and grandfather and getting to know his African relatives.

Barack Obama’s international background makes him a different kind of politician.  In the United States, if you look like Obama, you are identified as an African American. But while he is the progeny of an African and an American, his cultural roots are quite different from those of the historically African American community.  His heritage and life experience make him more of a cosmopolitan, cross-cultural character.  And this is one of his sources of appeal, especially among younger, urban Americans who have grown up in the age of globalization.  Traditional politicians are more parochially American than Obama.  They tend to represent “red” states or “blue,” urban or rural, business or labor, religious or secular constituencies.  But Obama’s life experience cuts across many of these populations, and his international quality gives him a bit more objective approach to being American that some wrongly interpret as elitist.  The abiding theme in his book and speeches is the desperate need for a fractured, politically embittered America to build a new consensus.  His study of our history has shown him that the country responds best to challenges when consensus exists and the two parties can work together to address a crisis, whether the Great Depression, World War Two, or the Cold War.  Consensus broke down in the bitter conflict over Vietnam, and the baby boom generation, which just preceded Obama, became permanently fractured by the trauma of that era. It is this division, with its relentless culture wars and debilitating political gridlock that Obama seeks to heal by finding the basis for a new consensus to meet the daunting challenges of this time.

Hillary Clinton’s perspective, often at the vortex of her deeply divided generation, is very different from Obama’s.  Her husband’s administration fell victim in good part to the very generational cleavage that so characterizes the baby boomers.  The shock troops of a militant conservative movement went after the Clintons from the moment they attained the White House. After taking over the Congress in 1994, conservatives heightened their attack by conducting endless investigations, blowing up every trivial irregularity into a so-called scandal.  The president’s sexual infidelities ultimately played into their hands, but they consistently displayed a hostile, take no prisoners attitude, offering little cooperation in the ongoing tasks of running the government.  In fact they shut down the government twice rather than compromise with the president and his party on budgetary issues.                   

This experience as first lady gave Clinton the modus operandi of trying to get something accomplished under the constant fire of extreme conservative partisanship. She has been forced to accentuate her feisty qualities so as to effectively take on those on the right who would rather rule ideologically than govern pragmatically.  Her supporters see her toughness as a necessary ingredient to deal with the antagonisms of a dangerous world, while viewing Obama’s calls for bipartisan cooperation in a new consensus as so much callow sweetness and light.  Yet if you look at the two candidates’ views on the issues, their stance in the international arena and the kinds of domestic legislation they support, they have more in common than not.

Clinton is known for her frequently hawkish stance towards adversarial states, presently North Korea and Iran.  She has vocally insisted on taking nothing off the table, i.e. reserving the military option should they insist on pursuing their nuclear programs. She voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment to classify Iran’s Army as a terrorist organization, a bill that was opposed by Obama as giving the Bush administration a basis for attacking Iran.  At the same time she also has stressed negotiation with Iran and other countries with which we have major differences.  She faults the Bush administration for simplistically classifying such countries as “evil,” and “outsourcing” negotiations with them to the European powers or China.  Obama too does not discount military action.  He has even talked about militarily pursuing al Qaeda into Pakistan.  But he gives priority to negotiation and has indicated his willingness to have summit conferences with leaders in Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.      

Both candidates fully back the Israeli government’s militaristic policies, insisting that Palestinians renounce terrorism and that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist without requiring Israel to relinquish its continuous settlement building in and military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.  Obama previously had a more even handed position, but he feels pressure, as does Clinton, from the American Israel lobby and official Jewish organizations that endorse Israeli militarism.  Neither candidate seems to realize that Jewish American opinion runs more toward peacemaking than does that of their official spokespersons.

On Iraq, Hillary voted for the war and Obama vocally opposed it while he was an Illinois state legislator.  But since he has been in the Senate, Obama has dutifully voted to fund it.  He favors a gradual redeployment of troops to places like Afghanistan, as does Clinton.  Both candidates articulate a need for some American troops to remain in Iraq for years to come.  Neither favors complete withdrawal, as did former Democratic candidates, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich, or Republican candidate, Ron Paul.                           

On the matter of enhancing government surveillance and other powers to fight terrorism, Clinton voted for the Patriot Act.  Obama was not yet in the Senate. Both voted for the revised, slightly scaled down version of the Patriot Act. Both candidates voted against the Military Commissions Act, creating military tribunals for prisoners accused of terrorism and giving the president powers to suspend habeas corpus and declare martial law. Both also oppose the administration’s use of torture and warrentless wiretaps.

In the domestic realm, both candidates offer comprehensive national health insurance in cooperation with insurance companies. Clinton’s plan requires mandates, while Obama’s does not.  As a result commentators like economist Paul Krugman view Clinton’s plan as stronger.  Obama fears that mandating the purchase of health insurance without adequate aid might unfairly burden low income people.  Both candidates favor the Employee Free Choice Act in support of workers’ right to join unions or work for them without harassment from or firing by their employers.  On global warming both favor cap and trade provisions for industry.  Clinton supports the development of a green building fund and green collar job training. Obama speaks generally of broadening plans for reducing greenhouse gases through reduced carbon emissions.

Both candidates have assailed the Bush administration for its combination of huge tax cuts for the richest segment of the population coupled with vastly increased military expenditures in support of two wars, a policy that violates traditional Republican fiscal conservatism and has led to spiraling deficits.  Both would eliminate tax breaks for the rich and those given oil companies and would raise the low capital gains tax, which favors high income people. Both have proposed substantial government relief measures for borrowers victimized by subprime loans.  Clinton voted for the bankruptcy bill that favored credit card companies, making it more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy without continuing to pay their debts.  Obama voted against it.   

Overall, Obama is somewhat more liberal than Clinton, but not significantly so.  Their differences are more of style than substance.  When I was sixteen, I watched the first televised debate between presidential candidates, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  The two men agreed about most things, with only hairsplitting differences.  People who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon won.  Those who watched it on TV thought Kennedy did.  It was a time of consensus, and the candidates, Democrat and Republican, were about as close together as the two Democrats, Obama and Clinton.  But today there is a major split between the parties.  Both candidates are poles apart from the policies of John McCain, which are equivalent to those of George W. Bush.  Also, in the Kennedy Nixon debates, real journalists asked objective questions about genuine foreign and domestic issues.  Today news hacks keep candidates from focusing on issues by badgering them with questions about verbal gaffes, personal associations, and other distracting trivia.  The effect has been to keep Americans from being informed about the candidates’ positions on real issues, a huge disservice to all Americans.