As Bill Clinton's casket is rolled toward its political grave, some bystanders will note a vigorous thump-ing. It's Bill, of course, trying to convince America that he's not dead yet.
Right he is. To be sure, the president had hoped for a dashing start and is currently looking a little green around the ankles - gangrene, that is - but he has many miles to hobble before he passes on. In the meantime, his administration is described as suffering from illnesses it truly doesn't have, including negative press coverage, a "problem" declared so often that it surely must be doubted. A look at the evidence thoroughly rewards the skeptic.First consider the press treatment accorded first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose health-care assignment places her among the most powerful members of the Clinton team.
Listen to Time magazine's Margaret Carlson lick Hillary's pumps: "As the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium through which the remaining anxieties over feminism are being played out." Carlson also used Vanity Fair to extol the Icon's every aspect - her diet, her relations with her husband and her considerable spunk: "The people who line up after the hearing for a word, an autograph, to shake her hand, and the 100,000 people who have written to say they think she is doing the right thing seem to appreciate her core of unbendable steel."
Dan Rather, the anchorman, has given similar praise; after the president congratulated him on his link-up with Connie Chung, Rather fell at the first couple's feet and kissed everything in sight, missing Socks only because Socks was missing: "If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners. . . . Thank you very much, and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we're pulling for her."
It is true that the president has taken a few shots - $200 haircuts are, by law, the stuff of mandatory ridicule - but there is a great deal of sympathy in the press for the president's politics. New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman explained it this way on a Washington talk show:
"What he says so often, it seems to me, is right on about where the economy is, what we need to do to create more jobs in this country, what we need to do to tackle the deficit, but something is missing in that White House because it's not delivering on the other end. . . . It was truly depressing. You say to yourself, `We are at a watershed moment in this country's history and these people are so muffing it."'
Nonetheless, some see huge trouble. Last week, the Wall Street Journal's James Perry made this odd observation: "Mr. Clinton faces the unhappy prospect of joining Mr. Nixon as the second president of the modern media age to attempt to communicate with the country through a filter of unhappy and sometimes openly adversarial journalists."
Perry, in his agony, must have forgotten Ronald Reagan, who seldom met a journalist who shared his politics. A study by the Media Research Center, conducted a year after Reagan left office, found that among major publications (including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, News-week, Time and U.S. News & World Report), negative assessments of his presidency outnumbered positive ones by 555 to 79.
Such studies can be fairly subjective; a look at some of the criticisms is of more use.
Ponder this gem from Boston Globe writer Matthew Gilbert: "Add to this visual pop lexicon the newest hip eye-opener: cross-dressing. As if to punctuate the end of the socially stagnant Reagan era, a parade of drag images is now crossing screens big and small, mostly men bedecked in wigs, lipstick and scarves to hide their protruding Adam's apples."
That's Reagan - guilty of forcing men to wear pants. Now that's bad press.