We've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately--this time from Elizabeth Wurtzel on TheAtlantic.com (1/9/12):

All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let's start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated--consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we are not a country that loves ideology--we're not, heaven forbid, France--so much as we are a can-do people that, after all, last elected a yes-we-can president. We like what works, not what it says in The Communist Manifesto, which reads like a guidebook for a republic of dreams, and of course ends in a Stalinist bloodbath. Romney's, shall we say, flexibility (I refuse to use the word that refers to summer footwear) with his positions on abortion and just about everything else that makes the weasel go pop just shows that he is responsive to his constituents' desires. When they were a pro-choice crowd, that's where he stood, and when he fell in with the right-wing lunatics, he learned to speak in tongues. I think giving the people what they want is what we want.

This echoes Ann Gerhart in the Washington Post (12/11/11):

And in service of these goals, Romney's flip-floppery could be interpreted as a flexibility of thinking that might help him bust through warring ideologies in Washington--an asset, not a deficit--and fix his biggest set of problems yet.

And Frank Bruni in the New York Times (1/2/12):

But what if his doubters, his nemeses and many of us pondering the protean wonder of him have it all wrong? What if changeability is his strength? Someone not fixed in a single place can pivot to more advantageous ones. A vessel partly empty has room for the beverage du jour. And Romney is ready to be filled with whatever's most nutritive....

In the primaries, that’s a liability, and Santorum, with his ideological rigidity, could haunt Romney for a while. But if Romney nabs the nomination, his malleability may be an asset, allowing Obama-soured voters to talk themselves into him. After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn’t cling to extremes.

Later in the Times, Helene Cooper and Mark Landler (1/5/12) warned the Obama campaign to avoid attacking Romney as a political shapeshifter, again depicting that as one of the Republican's hidden strengths:

Independent voters might view Mr. Romney's shifting positions as pragmatic. And by highlighting his evolving views, political analysts say, the Obama campaign risks unintentionally promoting the image of Mr. Romney as a moderate.

The very things that have made Mr. Romney less palatable to the conservatives who populate the Republican primaries and caucuses--his past moderate positions--are what make him more palatable to the independent voters who will turn up next November.

Note that this is not the way that media pundits talk about Democratic primary candidates when they attempt to make ideological appeals to their party's base. (See Extra!, 7-8/06, for some good examples of this.) In media mythology, Democrats win when they attack their base--trying to appeal to them makes them seem "craven, weak and untrustworthy," in Joe Klein's words (Time, 9/25/05).

Why are Democrats and Republicans seen so differently? Well, the Democratic base likes it when you make populist economic appeals--that is, when you point out that the sort of people who own the media have too much wealth and power. From the corporate media perspective, that's not clever, that's dangerous.

Appealing to the Republican right, on the other hand, generally involves a little harmless racebaiting and god-bothering. Media pundits are confident (probably overly confident) that when the election is over, Romney will go back to the technocratic champion of moderate austerity and defender of corporate profits who they believe him to be at heart. And that's the kind of candidate who appeals to the media's base.

UPDATE: See Peter Hart's post "Pundits and the Romney Pass" (1/10/12) for more on this phenomenon.

Frank Bruni has been named the new Sunday op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Bruni has been writing restaurant reviews for the past few years, but came to a lot of people's attention as the reporter covering the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush. Bruni went on to write a book about that experience, and one of the lessons in the book was that what Bruni actually thought about Bush's campaign rhetoric and debate performances wasn't really what he was reporting at the time.

I wrote something about this when the book came out, though I can't recall whether or not it was ever used anywhere. Part of this was adapted for an episode of CounterSpin, that much I know for sure.

Covering Bush, or Covering Up for Him?

By Peter Hart

Though conservatives still pound away at the idea that the media won't cut them a break, it's hard to argue that Bush has been given anything but kid glove treatment from the mainstream press, all the way back to the early days of his candidacy.

A new book by New York Times correspondent Frank Bruni fills in some of the details in Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. While it is a peek behind the curtains of one of the most guarded and careful administrations in recent memory, the book also tells another, perhaps more important story about a rather lazy and inconsistent press corps.

Though he doesn't make much of it, Bruni offers some valuable evidence that he pulled his punches while covering Bush. Sometimes the evidence is clear. Bruni explains that at one point he "deliberately soft-pedaled" Bush's difficulties explaining his tax cut and his apparent trouble communicating in his native tongue. In the home stretch of the campaign, Bruni writes that he gave only cursory attention to Bush's late acknowledgment of an arrest for driving under the influence. Bruni's story led not with the arrest details but with Bush's "lashing out" at Al Gore over an unrelated matter. The curious news judgment earned Bruni a hearty endorsement from the Texas governor: "You're a good man."

In other areas, Bruni is not so forthcoming. In the book, Bush is "at best mediocre" in his first debate with Al Gore, and from where Bruni sat it looked like "Bush was in the process of losing the presidency." Sadly, his newspaper reporting was almost a mirror image: Bruni led his October 4 debate report not with how bad Bush was, but how obnoxious Al Gore was. In fact, the first four paragraphs are all Gore, whose "self-satisfied grin" and "oratorical intimidation" just rubbed Bruni the wrong way. It's nice to now Bruni's now getting around to telling us how he really felt--long after it matters.

This revisionism continued once Bush took office. As Bruni explains in the book, on Bush's first day in office he reinstated a ban on federal funding for groups overseas that provide abortion counseling, sometimes called the "gag rule." Bush's explanation was different, though; he said that he was acting to limit federal dollars from being used to promote abortion. A good catch, but one Bruni failed to make at the time, preferring instead to accept Bush's "conviction" without a word to suggest Bush was not telling the whole truth.  Other reporters managed to nail Bush for his deception.

Since Bruni provides little evidence to suggest that he was a cut above his peers on the campaign trail, one can assume that the image of a president that seems aloof, careless or even inattentive has nothing to do with media being too critical of him. In fact, it's more likely that we only know the half of it. And who's to blame for that? Bruni, for one, thinks that "modern politics wasn't just superficial because the politicians made it so. It was superficial because the voters let it be." If that’s the case, then those charged with exposing political chicanery--namely, folks like Bruni himself--have plenty of work to do. It's too bad they seem so unlikely to step up to the plate.

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler also documented the wide gap between what Bruni wrote in his book and what he wrote in the New York Times.

Eater blog editor Amanda Kludt (8/20/09) has a sneak look at an embarrassingly fawning New York Times review of a new book by their own recently resigned food critic, Frank Bruni--and, "according to a tipster with a copy (not yet online), it's a looooovefest":

Exhibit A:

His writing has always been muscular and clear. Now that I have devoured his memoir, I hold him in even greater estimation, not only for his discernment and his accomplished prose but for his bravery.

OK, Dominique Browning, so you're impressed. But how about sending some more kisses Bruni's way? Exhibit B:

The love with which Bruni writes about his family is breathtaking. His relationship with his mother was one of ferocious tenderness; as I read Bruni's description of her struggle with cancer, I choked with tears.

"One benefit of holding a job of high import at the New York Times is that when you write a book, outlets line up to review it," notes Kludt--but isn't it a bit inappropriate that this should this be "including the esteemed Sunday Book Review"?