The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [57]
A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background. Maybe it also had something to do with my style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose (both my staff and Michelle often remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy in the literary class.
Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the political reporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters. They’ve taped our conversations, tried to provide the context for my statements, and called me to get a response whenever I’ve been criticized.
So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of how rapidly that process can work in reverse.
Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held during my first year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five hundred people, which means that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to twenty thousand people. Should I sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had direct, personal contact with maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my constituents by the time Election Day rolls around.
In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicago media market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other words, I—like every politician at the federal level—am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.
The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism isn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American journalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objective journalism emerged after World War II.
Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit. Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let them have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part because they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skill with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.
In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made him so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “his self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated