I’m not as frequent a disparager of MSM political coverage as a lot of progressive bloggers, but I’ve gotta say, the efforts we’ve seen in the chattering classes to make the Blagojevich scandal somehow reflect poorly on Barack Obama doth smelleth to high heaven.
I mean, everything that’s come out on L’Affaire Blago has fully exculpated Team Obama from any complicity. And indeed, what we’ve learned shows the president-elect in a very good light as someone who never came close to wheeling-and-dealing with the guy, and more generally, had an unusually distant non-relationship with Blago considering that he was, after all, the elected and reelected governor of Obama’s home state, representing Obama’s party. On top of everything else, Obama made a rare intervention in state politics in the middle of his presidential campaign by pushing for enactment of an ethics law that appears to have convinced Blago that the window was closing on his pay-for-play games, leading to his latest and fatal bout of reckless knavery. Other than horse-whipping the governor publicly, it’s hard to say what more Obama could have done.
But as BarbinMD shows at DailyKos today, none of this has kept political reporters from darkly suggesting that the Blago scandal is casting some sort of giant shadow on the Obama presidency. As she explains, the basic media dynamic is that reporters find some Republican to say it’s a problem for Obama, and thus they have a “story” manufactured out of thin air and partisan malice.
Maybe all this represents sheer journalistic laziness, or the cynical calculation of reporters who know they can get serious ink by linking two big stories–the juicy Blago scandal, and the Obama transition. Or maybe it’s a sign that some folk in the MSM, still smarting from endless claims that they are “in the tank” for Obama, want to prove otherwise by coming up with an “Obamagate” before the man has even taken office.
But at some point, it really needs to stop, or get derisively hooted off the front page and the evening news.