MSM: What Took You So Long?

Conservatives are having a grand old time this election season watching the Clintons in eclipse.

Back in 1992 Bill Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope, and anyone who disagreed was a Clinton hater.

But now Barack Obama is the Great Liberal Hope and the Clintons are just a dynasty in terminal decline.

What took you so long, MSMers?

We could invent a poetical allusion, and talk, Dover Beach-like about the now retreating sea of faith in the Clintons:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

And that tells us a lot, because the notion of the Great Liberal Hope is a substitute for religion, an “immanentizing of the eschaton,” the bringing down to Earth of transcendent hope into a faith in a mortal politician.

Columnist Rich Lowry rehearses the canonical withdrawal of faith in finger-on-the-liberal-pulse Vanity Fair.

The usual audience for Clinton excuse-making isn’t listening. Witness the long, scathing profile of the post-presidential Clinton in Vanity Fair by former New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum. Purdum writes that it once was "easy enough to retain an enduring affection" for Clinton, despite "his indiscipline" and "his shortcomings."

Yes, it was “easy enough” back in the good old days when Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope.

But no more. Today the liberal elites have fallen out of love with the Clintons. In 2008 the Great Liberal Hope of 1992 is campaigning against the Great Liberal Hope of 2008. Now, all of a sudden, the soft focus lenses come off and the MSM gets to show us the Clintons in high-contrast black-and-white.

All in all, I’d rather be a Republican. Then you never get an even break from the mainstream media; indeed, you never expect it.