Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.

This is the kind of language one expects to encounter when reporters have to figure out ways to talk about racism without calling it racism. In Monday's Times (1/16/12--Martin Luther King Jr. Day),  John Harwood reported on why several Republicans didn't pursue the presidential nomination:

Political heavyweights who declined to enter the 2012 race all had uniquely personal reasons. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana faced family resistance; former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi feared being bogged down in the politics of race; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey doubted his readiness for the Oval Office.

People who remember the Barbour story might not recall anything about a bog. Barbour talked to the Weekly Standard in late 2010, and he professed fond memories of the white supremacist Citizens Council groups in Mississippi. In Barbour's mind they were anti-Klan activists, which as critics pointed out, is a rather remarkable description of groups that were founded to oppose school integration and protest civil rights advocates.

That controversy brought up other unpleasant Barbour stories, like this anecdote from a 1982 New York Times article (dug up by Ben Smith at Politico) about Barbour's Congressional campaign:

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be "coons" at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

That the obvious racism on display is characterized as "racial sensitivity" suggests the Times hasn't changed a whole lot over the years.

One point that Rutenberg's piece today makes is that the pointed questions that were posed to Gingrich at the recent debate were asked by a black reporter: Fox's Juan Williams.  To Williams, there's nothing subtle about what Gingrich is doing here; it is  "more than a dog whistle.... It's a hoot and a holler."

It could be that journalists of color would be more likely to call out a candidate making these kinds of appeals.  That's less likely when there are few journalists of color covering the campaign. To take just one outlet as an example, Richard Prince recently noted in his Journal-isms column (1/4/12) that Time magazine does not have any blacks or Latinos covering the 2012 political season.

American voters loathe both major symbols of the forces squeezing their pocketbooks and life savings.

President Obama will seek re-election vowing to rein in one of them: Wall Street. Mitt Romney will focus on the other: Washington.

There are some complications (Republicans attacking Mitt Romney's "vulture" capitalism for starters), but Harwood assures readers that soon enough the candidates will be back to the sensible middle.

But what's the center?

Romney's right-wing rhetoric about Obama's fondness for Big Government and European socialism is a staple of his campaign. But the evidence of Obama's leftward anti-Wall Street message is a little harder to come by. This is where Harwood sees it:

He called for a 21st-century version of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive movement that would raise taxes on the wealthy to finance job-creating improvements in infrastructure, education and scientific research. Mr. Obama's view draws strength from voters' antipathy toward a Wall Street culture that prospered while Main Street struggled--and then received a taxpayer bailout.

Harwood  tells readers not to much worry about what they're hearing, since they'll be back to The Middle soon enough:

Dramatic oratory aside, Messrs. Romney and Obama are seeking ways to position themselves as reasonable centrists in a general election. Mr. Obama on Wednesday announced that he will offer new business tax breaks for companies that return jobs to the United States. Mr. Romney has defended Social Security against Mr. Perry's ideas for transforming it, and criticized Mr. Gingrich for suggesting a weakening of child labor laws.

The implication, of course, is that neither of them is being particularly reasonable now. In the case of Mitt Romney, perhaps that means he doesn't really mean Obama is seeking "to put free enterprise on trial." To Harwood, Romney's centrism is that he supports child labor law and doesn't believe Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. That doesn't tell us much.

But as the Christian Science Monitor reported, Romney's actual Social Security plan would "gradually raise the retirement age to reflect increases in longevity."  That's not a particularly popular idea, but it's the kind of thing corporate media tend to support.

As for Obama,  is it really reasonable centrism to call for corporate tax breaks? Harwood seems to think so, especially when set against the left-wing Obama who calls for tax hikes on the wealthy to finance jobs programs. But those unreasonably progressive policies would seem to be fairly popular, even by the Times' own polling.

As is often the case, when media say "center," they don't mean policies that most people support. They mean policies that seem sensible to them. The two are not the same thing.

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

In the Los Angeles Times (5/3/09), Peter Nicholas noted that while the public still supports Obama, "the activist government Obama has unleashed is increasingly worrisome to voters, polls show."

He explained:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 47 percent of those surveyed believe "government should do more," compared with 46 percent who believe "government is doing too many things." In July, the gap between those who wanted government to do more and those who believed it was doing too much was 11 percentage points.

So there is now a 47-46 split on whether government should "do more" or whether it is "doing too many things." Those are rather vague categories, but the point is that we can see an 11 point shift from February. It's worth noting that the new numbers are about the same as last October, which might suggest that it's hard to put too much weight on one poll question. And this question was only asked of half the sample this time around (which raised the margin of error from 3.1 to 4.4 percentage points).

Today, New York Times reporter John Harwood tried to make a similar point, noting that while Obama is still popular (judging by the "is the country on the right track" polling):

Paradoxically, however, that success may complicate Mr. Obama's task going forward by easing the sense of crisis. And that, in turn, could help Republicans argue that he seeks an excessively costly expansion of government's role.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in February showed that 51 percent of Americans wanted government to do more to solve problems, compared with 40 percent who said government was "doing too many things." Last week, the same survey showed an even split; a 52 percent majority said Mr. Obama had taken on "too many other issues" besides the economy.

Harwood is actually comparing the results of different poll questions. That latter question about doing too much outside economic policy is what he's trying to emphasize, but one look at the wording of that question might give you pause:

"Looking at President Obama's first 100 days, do you feel that he and his administration have had a clear and sharp focus on the economy, or do you feel that President Obama and his administration have been trying to take on too many other issues at the same time?"

The loaded language--has the White House been "clear and sharp"-- seems designed to get a negative response. And it echoes one of the favorite complaints of the Beltway press corps of late--that Obama is trying to do too many things at once. Now they've got a poll to match their anxiety.