When they can't go directly after something a Republican or conservative candidate says, the establishment press attempts to make a big deal out of dumb things their aides utter or publish.
Leftist apparatchiks usually have no such worries. The latest example of an item which would be prominently in the news if a Republican or conservative had written something equally dense comes from Lanny Davis, longtime Clinton family apologist and career Democratic Party hack. In a column appearing at the Hill, Davis whined about the supposedly awful "media frenzy" which occurred two weeks ago at a Hillary Clinton event with supposedly "everyday Americans" in Hampton, New Hampshire. Davis compared the travails and indignities the poor, put-upon Mrs. Clinton suffered to ... well, readers will see who after the jump (bolds are mine):
Lanny Davis: Hillary Clinton and the frenzy of the media
"Mobs of reporters and cameramen and other Big Timers were out there wearing bush jackets with leather straps running this way and that and knocking back their Pepsi-Colas and Nehis and yelling to each other and mainly just milling about, crazy with the excitement of being on the scene, bawling for news of the anguished soul of Louise Shepard. ..."
— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979), describing the media scrum at the home of Louise Shepard,
wife of Alan Shepard, America’s first astronaut, who had
just returned safely from a suborbital flight in space.Has anything changed?
Decades later, on May 22, Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed was in the small town of Hampton, N.H., covering a Hillary Clinton event at — I am not making this name up — Smuttynose Brewing Co., a locally owned small business that proudly brews its own brands of beer.
Cramer reported that a small group of 60 local townspeople attended, including Lenore and Gary Patton, ages 78 and 79, respectively. For about an hour, the Pattons and the five dozen other guests listened to Clinton talk “in granular detail” about challenges facing small businesses.
The event was open to the press. And here’s what happened next, as reported by Cramer:
“The spell of the everyday was broken. Clinton was swarmed by reporters."
So Lanny Davis is essentially claiming that a candidate for President of the United States has as much right to be left alone by the press as the wife of an astronaut.
The man clearly has no shame.
He was also duped.
Davis went on to describe the supposedly horrible suffering of the Pattons, and then relayed what they said as reported in Ruby Cramer's BuzzFeed piece:
"Hey," Gary said to no one in particular. "She’s smart. She’s experienced. End of story. ... This woman has what it takes."
"She has ideas for the direction of the country she wants to go in," said Lenore. "She cares about the middle class. We’re about as middle class as you can get."
"She’s so experienced, she’s so bright, and she’s so adroit," her husband added. "And I came in here not necessarily feeling all of these things, but I go away thinking that we would be lucky to have her as the president, because she has so many attributes that you need. It’s an incredibly impressive performance."
A CNN poll published on Tuesday reported that the former secretary of State’s favorable and trustworthiness ratings have dropped. Shocking! She has been pounded virtually every day for the last two months by mainstream media, far-right media and every Republican running for president, so that shouldn’t be surprising.
So Hillary's negatives have gone up entirely because the press has been hounding her.
Her decline has nothing to do with the negative but accurate information about her disgraceful engineering of the disastrous regime change in Libya as Secretary of State. It has nothing to do with her lying about the circumstances surrounding the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi — including lying to the faces of the families of the dead as the caskets arrived back home. Nor does her polling decline have anything to do with her absolutely unethical and likely illegal conduct of State Department business on a private server at her home.
No, it's all the media's fault, especially "far-right" media. What utter rubbish.
As to the Pattons, if what they said seems obviously rehearsed, it's because it almost definitely was.
As I noted last night, the Pattons, who only claimed to be "local activists," are really a Democratic Party "power couple" in the Granite State. Their endorsements of Barack Obama were considered important enough in December 2007 to merit coverage in the New York Observer. Both are still active, prominent Democrats. Lenore Patton is currently the Vice Chair of the Rockingham County Democratic Party, while Gary is an at-large member of its Executive Committee. So the Pattons were plants.
Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, had a perfect response to Davis's dreadful dreck (HT Twitchy):
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
