Hillary's Media Shenanigans

Hillary Clinton has a secret you don't know about...
and you won't, either.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has led a strong effort on keeping the lid on their most embarrassing moments, ties, and comments. Clinton's Communications Director Howard Wolfson has been at the helm of the media control, crisis management, and sometimes story suppression. The question arises of just how does the Clinton campaign control the media surrounding her so well?

Many stories criticizing the Clinton campaign have come out but the most damaging stories have stayed relatively quiet (a campaign staffer, Mickey Kantor, calling Indiana's people "s**t") in comparison to the Obama campaign's disastrous media control ( Rev. Wright ring a bell?) The Clinton campaign is using some very heavy leverage to stop big media outlets from publicizing her most embarrassing stories, access to Bill Clinton.

Former president Clinton will always be a news story, win or lose for Hillary, and the Clinton campaign are betting their chips that no media outlet is going to want to jeopardize their access to him just to run a hot story on Hillary. So far, the pressure has worked. Barack Obama on the other hand has been sorely missing a good media crisis response team and it is costing him heavily. The Wright controversy and the "bitter" comments cost him a closer finish in Pennsylvania and are seriously hurting his numbers among whites, blue collar workers, and rural voters.

One of the Achilles heels of Hillary Clinton is the perception (rightly so, I believe) that she is disingenuous and ready to do anything to get what she wants. These media suppression tactics are definitely feeding into that perception and are not helping her readiness if in a huge coup she takes the Democratic nomination. Chances are that somewhere down the line, Republicans are going to really turn up the heat and expose something that she will be unable to suppress and what will happen next will be a toss-up, either a well-planned crisis management plan or a complete meltdown. That being said Obama who now has much more experience taking heavy media fire is really going to have to work on his team's response management, time after time his response has been too slow, too weak or too philosophical. Obama is really going to need to get his responses ready and right before the convention if he wants to show super-delegates he has a chance against a GOP that seems to be almost in desperation to take the White House again.

In Conclusion,

Hillary Clinton needs to.. "man" up and start taking some real heat, stop dodging the media
Barack Obama needs to.. work on his responses to attacks, win Indiana in spite of the scandals
John McCain needs to.. raise money, describe his own plan on how to make the situation in Iraq better, raise money, outline his plans for the economy and health care, raise money, just keep cruising until June.

Links:

Newsbusters: Story on another Clinton Campaign Finance Fiasco
Newsbusters: Is the Honeymoon over?
CNN: Hillary's Rove Tacitics