Is 'The Moment' the new 'Dean Scream?'
Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 11:31:03 AM PDT
Hillary cried yesterday. She got choked up. Her voice cracked. She teared up. She got -- ready, here it comes -- emotional.
That's what the media has treated us to since yesterday -- ABC even dubbed it The Moment.
Just like a woman. Can we really trust them not to get all blubbery when the terrorists attack us next time?
That's the undercurrent I get, even if no one has the stupidity to come out and say it that explicitly.
Our friends at Fox came close:
Clinton Dismisses Claims of Being Too Emotional
The first paragraph lets us know that Clinton denies she had an "Ed Muskie moment." Good thing. Because we all know that when Muskie cried he was immediately written off as weak. We all know that crying is for girls, which means they are too emotional to be commander in chief, right?
Columbia Journalism Review notes that The Moment is getting hyper coverage by the national media and was virtually ignored by New Hampshire media.
It’s worth asking why, precisely, their national-media counterparts pounced on the Clinton story with such speed, ferocity, and, occasionally, thinly veiled glee. (“Click here to watch the video of Clinton getting emotional,” announces Fox News’ Web site. Directly below that, “Click here to see photos of Clinton’s emotional moment.”) The pack mentality is part of it, perhaps, but there’s more to it. Guys may cry, after all, but tears, culturally, are a Female Thing. And the word ‘emotional’ is rarely used as flattery.
Whatever you may think of Clinton, watching what the national media is doing with this should make all of us lose our lunch. It's not unlike what was done to Howard Dean.
As The Moment lives on in the media, we’ve witnessed comparisons of Clinton to Howard “Dean-Scream” Dean or to prior candidate-crybabies (Ed Muskie in ‘72, Pat Schroeder in ‘87). But if we’re going to play the comparison, the most obvious and immediate foil for Clinton is Mitt Romney, who had a misty-eyed moment very similar to Clinton’s last month on Meet the Press. And how much coverage did his moment get?
