Wednesday marks 100 days since President Trump took workplace for the second time, and the information media will probably be prepared with report playing cards judging his new administration. Count on nastiness: Solely final week, ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews likened Trump to Adolf Hitler, at the same time as others at his outdated community are already floating the concept of “impeachment.”
But trying again at information protection of latest liberal Presidents at their 100-day mark, it’s been a veritable lovefest. Again in 1993, Time’s Michael Kramer fawned over Invoice Clinton’s financial program, calling it “the very definition of braveness.”
“The legislative achievements have been stupendous,” Time’s Joe Klein exclaimed in a syrupy write-up of Barack Obama’s 100 days in 2009.
“By way of mastery of the problems, now we have not often had a President who’s as properly briefed and speaks in as articulate a manner as this President does,” CNN’s David Gergen agreed that very same yr.
And 4 years in the past, liberal journalists have been mightily impressed with Joe Biden’s large spending schemes. “As a candidate, Mr. Biden pitched himself as a ‘transitional candidate,’” New York Occasions reporter Annie Karni wrote, however “his formidable plans, if handed, may make him a transformational determine in US historical past.”
And despite the fact that Hillary Clinton misplaced each time she ran for President, she acquired a flattering 100-days media profile after she grew to become a celeb Senator in 2001. “All agree, Clinton has thrown herself into work, usually placing in 16- to 18-hour days, immersing herself in particulars of laws, nearly by no means lacking a committee listening to,” ABC’s Linda Douglass cooed on Good Morning America April 12, 2001.
That’s not what you hear the media say about Republican Presidents. “Critics of the President say he speaks like a reasonable and acts like a conservative, that he does one factor and says one other,” NBC’s Matt Lauer badgered George W. Bush aide Karen Hughes on the forty third President’s one centesimal day in workplace.
And through Donald Trump’s first 100 days in 2017, MRC’s Geoffrey Dickens assembled a set of media quotes that includes phrases like “toxic,” “harmful,” “divisive,” “un-American,” “insidious” and “bizarre” — not the vocabulary of the standard media honeymoon.
Journalists actually received’t be any kinder to Trump once they evaluate his first 100 days this yr. However lest you suppose that such antagonistic protection is regular fare, listed below are quotes displaying the media elite’s very completely different strategy to a trio of liberal Presidents, all pulled from the MRC’s archives:
Invoice Clinton (1993)
■ “Nice salesman that he’s, Clinton will be considered as a sufferer of his personal success. His insistence on deficit discount — and his cajoling of Congress to help a multi-year plan to perform it — is the very definition of braveness in trendy American politics.”
— Time Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, Could 3, 1993.
■ “If we could possibly be one-hundredth as nice as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been within the White Home, we’d take it proper now and stroll away winners…Thanks very a lot, and inform Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”
— CBS Night Information anchor Dan Slightly speaking by way of satellite tv for pc to President Clinton about his new on-air partnership with Connie Chung at a CBS associates assembly, Could 27, 1993.
Barack Obama (2009)
■ “It didn’t take lengthy for Barack Obama — for all his youth and inexperience — to get acclimated to his new function because the calming chief of a rustic in disaster….Rookie jitters? Removed from it….For the previous three months, Obama has spoken in agency, but soothing tones. Typically he has used a just-folks strategy to establish with economically struggling residents. He has displayed wonkish tendencies, too, showing very similar to the school teacher he as soon as was whereas discussing the intricacies of the financial collapse. He has engaged in witty banter, teasing lawmakers, staffers, journalists and residents alike. He has struck a statesmanlike stance, calling for a renewed partnership between the US and its allies….”
— AP Washington correspondent Liz Sidoti in an April 25, 2009 dispatch, “Obama rapidly, confidently adapts to presidency.”
■ “By way of mastery of the problems, now we have not often had a President who’s as properly briefed and speaks in as articulate a manner as this President does. He’s nuanced. He’s very full….He’s taken it to an entire completely different degree in the best way he speaks about points….”
— CNN Senior Analyst David Gergen throughout reside protection following Obama’s press convention, April 29, 2009.
■ “Barack Obama is a really flabbergasting President. And in a great way — not the best way a few of his predecessors have been. He’s not flabberghastly….He’s not the scholar who wears a button that claims, ‘Smartest child at school,’ however clearly he’s, a minimum of when surrounded by the White Home press corps.”
— Washington Submit TV critic Tom Shales, April 30, 2009.
■ “The legislative achievements have been stupendous — the $789 billion stimulus invoice, the price range plan that’s nonetheless being hammered out (and should, in the end, embrace the subsequent landmark safety-net program, common medical insurance). There has additionally been a cascade of recent insurance policies to handle the monetary disaster — huge interventions within the housing and credit score markets, a market-based plan to purchase the poisonous property that many banks have on their books, a plan to bail out the auto business and a strict new regulatory regime proposed for Wall Avenue. Obama has additionally utterly overhauled overseas coverage, from Cuba to Afghanistan. ‘In a manner, Obama’s 100 days is much more dramatic than Roosevelt’s,’ says Elaine Kamarck of Harvard’s Kennedy College of Authorities. ‘Roosevelt solely needed to take care of a home disaster. Obama has needed to overhaul overseas coverage as properly, together with two wars. And that’s actually the key of why this has appeared so spectacular.’”
— Time’s Joe Klein within the journal’s Could 4, 2009 cowl story on Barack Obama’s first 100 days as President.
Joe Biden (2021)
■ “By the point Biden ascended to the presidency, he had refashioned himself as a transformational chief — a president ready to essentially overhaul the function of presidency in society on behalf of the nation’s working women and men….Biden got here to workplace citing 4 main crises — the coronavirus, the economic system, racial inequity and local weather change — and with these emergencies got here a possibility to go large and daring and impressive and to push by huge laws with or with out the help of Republican lawmakers in Washington.”
— Washington Submit White Home reporter Ashley Parker, April 27, 2021.
■ “As a candidate, Mr. Biden pitched himself as a ‘transitional candidate’…[but] his formidable plans, if handed, may make him a transformational determine in US historical past.”
— New York Occasions reporter Annie Karni, April 28, 2021.
■ New York Occasions’s Elaina Plott: “[He] delivered what was actually essentially the most progressive handle, I’d say, at a joint session, perhaps since LBJ….And but he packages it in such a manner, that he doesn’t give Republicans quite a bit to latch onto….Joe Biden’s brilliance in some methods is that its form of boring, and never going to excite lots of people.”…
NBC’s Sahil Kapur: “Whereas President Obama had this knack for making reasonable applications just like the Reasonably priced Care Act sound thrilling and revolutionary. Biden superpower is actual reverse. He makes huge multi-trillion-dollar FDR-size liberal coverage sound reasonable and center of the street, simply by the best way he talks about them…”
— Throughout MSNBC’s reside protection of Biden’s speech to Congress throughout the early morning hours of April 29, 2021.
For extra examples from our flashback collection, which we name the NewsBusters Time Machine, go right here.
