Pundits Switch Sides

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 12, 2001 | by Regina Holtman

Loss of easy-target Bill Clinton poses new challenges for the media. While the liberal press switches into attack mode against George W., conservatives must seek new angles.

Most conservative opiners agree that writing about President Clinton was becoming tedious and tiresome. But they admit the conservative press will have a more difficult job now that President George W. Bush is in the White House.

For one thing, conservatives no longer have an easy target to criticize. "A 9-year-old could write columns poking fun at Clinton," says Charles Krauthammer, a conservative syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. "Look at his last-minute pardons and his behavior on Inauguration Day. He's like a clown."

His loss has become the left's gain, as liberal opponents prepare to mount a frontal assault against Bush's political agenda. "It's a clarifying moment in the liberal community," says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, a leftist opinion magazine.

The liberal press may have an obvious target in directing criticism toward Bush, but that doesn't make their task easy, says Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, a Washington-based liberal-opinion weekly. "It's always simpler to be writing about an administration with which you generally disagree, as we do with a Republican administration" he says. "But the trick is disagreeing without being predictable."

The New Republic recently ran an editorial warning the Bush administration not to abandon its plan for school vouchers. Unlike most liberal publications, the New Republic supports voucher initiatives, at least on an experimental basis. The magazine also ran positive articles on Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Tommy G. Thompson, Bush's pick to head the Department of Health and

Human Services.

In fact, Beinart was happy to say goodbye to the Clinton administration, at least in some ways. "We found ourselves in the position of agreeing with the policies, but finding the culture of the administration to be distasteful" he says. "That's a difficult position to express in print."

Yet for all the turmoil of the Clinton years, the liberal press has no intention of going easy on the Bush administration. "I think one of the vulnerabilities is they insist on acting as if they won an uncontested election," Beinart says. "They are going to act as if they didn't lose the popular vote, as if Florida never happened. I think that makes them, down the road, politically and ideologically vulnerable."

The Nation's vanden Heuvel is even more critical of what she calls "George W. Inc." "With Bush, you really do see the corporate power, the money-soaked politics, the extremism and the intolerance far more vividly," she says.

At any rate, vanden Heuvel and Beinart pledge to keep the issues they care about front and center. Conservative magazines also will become more focused on substantive issues than when Clinton was in office, predicts Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va." Conservative journalists have been focused on scandal in the last eight years," he says. "Now they will be focused on policies. It makes you feel like you are living in a healthier political culture instead of debating what the meaning of `is' is."

Magazines such as the Weekly Standard, a Washington-based conservative-opinion weekly, have to walk a fine line between promoting conservative causes and crossing over into the Bush public-relations camp. "We're in the business of journalism" says Executive Editor Fred Barnes. "We are a conservative weekly magazine, but that doesn't mean we're a PR organ for anybody."

The same thing can be said of the National Review, which advocates the need for limited government. The magazine will stand by the president as long as he stands by that conservative principle. "Our primary goal is not promoting Republicans or being supportive of Republicans" says Editor Rich Lowry. "We're going to be Bush's foul-weather friends. When he is in dire straits like in Florida, or when he is trying to sell a policy that the mainstream media opposes, we'll be defending him. But when he's bending toward what the Washington Post and the New York Times might like, we're going to be critical."

Lowry admits that the National Review will have greater access to the internal dynamics of the Bush administration than it did to the Clinton administration. "The advantage is that we no longer have to press our noses against the glass looking from the outside," he says.

But the conservative press runs the danger of losing an important journalistic advantage in the post-Clinton era: the intense opposition the Clintons generated among many on the right. Between 1992 and 1994, during the first two years of Clinton's presidency, National Review's circulation skyrocketed from 168,000 to 265,000. The magazine probably will not receive the same increase in circulation during the first few years of Bush's tenure in office.

"Journalism is always more interesting when it is negative and in opposition," Lowry says. "There just won't be the burst of anger and fear that there was when Clinton was elected?"