Obama campaign senior strategist David Axelrod appears to have incredible confidence that the legacy media will continue to cover for his candidate. Yesterday, citing that Chicagoan’s tweets, Erika Johnsen quipped that “the Obama campaign is back with the ‘Romney is the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon’-esque attacks.”
Considering all the documents — not to mention information about campaign donors — the president and his campaign are hiding — or refusing to provide — it is simply amazing Mr. Axelrod would make much of Mr. Romney’s supposed secrecy.
Wonder why it is, say, the legacy media are not running stories wondering about Mr. Obama’s failure to provide his medical records. As Victor Davis Hanson reminds us:
Given . . . media demands in 2008 that the septuagenarian cancer survivor John McCain should release thousands of pages of medical records for journalists’ perusal, why did not Barack Obama simply release his medical records? The Left had always trumpeted the desire for “full disclosure” and was probably right in wanting McCain to assure us that he was hale; but, again, why was Obama given a complete pass?
Mr. Obama still has not released those records. “We are still perplexed”, Hanson adds, “why Barack Obama for over decade permitted Kenya to be listed as his birthplace on his literary agent’s biography of him.” And we wonder what his undergraduate transcripts might reveal — or what we might learn from those Justice Department documents the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed.
Seems Mr. Axelrod may not know how to run a good campaign defense, but he does have confidence that the legacy media are less interested in the background of Democratic candidates than of Republican ones.
“Accountable”? Are you even allowed to say that word and “journalists” in the same question?
I constantly confront David Axelrod’s hypocrisy by asking about Obama’s sealed college, medical records & passport (!). Why would Obama seal his passport???
This is bound to backfire on Team Obama.
Douglas, I base my title on the “new reportorial idiom” (“accountability journalism”) the AP coined in the Bush era, a type of reporting they seem to have avoided under the current president.
Not necessarily. All they or their surrogates have to do is say something to the effect of “that’s old news” and “President Obama has been President for almost four years; the American people already know who he is.”
It doesn’t have to be literally true, of course. Just sound logical.