WP: Team Obama Is Courting Everybody But the Press

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 28, 2008; Page C01

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- When reporters filed onto Barack Obama's press plane after his acrimonious debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton last week, one thing was noticeably missing amid the wine and snacks on the Boeing 737.

There was no high-level campaign spinner to argue that Obama had gotten the better of the exchanges or that the verbal fisticuffs were part of some precisely calculated strategy. On the press bus the next day, mid-level aides dealt with travel logistics but made no attempt to shape the coverage.

In an age of all-out political warfare, the Obama campaign is a bit of an odd duck: It is not obsessed with winning each news cycle. The Illinois senator remains a remote figure to those covering him, and his team, while competent and professional, makes only spotty attempts to drive its preferred story lines in the press.

"There is no charm offensive from the candidate toward the press corps," says Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe. "The contact is limited. . . . They see the national media more as a logistical problem than a channel for getting stuff out."

As Obama's blowout victory in Saturday's South Carolina primary shows, an aloof attitude toward the media may not be a liability for a candidate with his oratorical gifts. Even the pundits' attempts to minimize his win by focusing on Obama's capturing a quarter of the white vote -- no small achievement in a three-way contest -- came after a week in which journalists talked about race far more than he did. But the contrast in his press strategy is striking, not just with Clinton's campaign -- which aggressively lobbies journalists around the clock -- but also with the Bush White House and the Clinton White House before that. And that, Obama aides say, is by design.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/27/AR2008012702160.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

He has watched and learned what the press can and will do to smack down a good person. Likely, he saw the Dean Scream played back ten million times and got the hint.

The Obama campaign doesnt suck up to the media, doesnt give them inside info, doesnt even really want to have much to do with them, but the Clinton supporters swear that Obama is getting more favorable media coverage?

How bad must the Clinton campaign be treating the media if Obama is getting that imagined free ride?

I've noticed since the beginning of his campaign that he does not play the media game, and is not afraid to call them out when they dance their little dances--the dances that have kept this nation in a strangehold since at least the 90s. The case is taken directly to the people, without the intercession of the fourth estate. That is true populism, and it's been pretty successful.

The media has been our number one problem since the days of Clinton impeachment and through the coronation of GWB and his misbegotten presidency and his destructive war. Disdaining the media is a huge plus in my book: it's the only way to transform our politics and get real substantive change. Watch it happen, and think.

who've been aloof with the press. Gore, for example -- who was savaged by the press, who loved to banter and beer with W. The press loves Obama now, but this makes me wonder if they would find it easy to turn on him with a vengeance at some time in the future.

The talking heads and print pundits are all gushy with praise for, and have girlish crushes on, BO. I cannot think of a single bad thing they've written about him -- or a single statement of his that they have purposely "spun" into a negative story.

Hillary is getting exactly the opposite treatment. To the point where even members of the hate-Hillary media are themselves admitting that the media hates Hillary these days. They don't regret being unfair to her, and they don't intend to change, but at least, like Chrissy, they are owning up to their antipathy toward anything Clinton.

imagine the secrecy if wins the office.