Media Tell Obama--Don't Be a Lefty Like Clinton

Rewriting the '94 election to find a centrist moral

11/7/08

Immediately after Barack Obama was pronounced the victor in the 2008 presidential election, corporate media began to tell him how he ought to govern--in most cases, urging him to hew toward the center. To support their argument, many journalists pointed to President Bill Clinton's first term to find lessons in centrism for Obama. But are media getting the history wrong?

In that "unhappy first year in office," wrote the Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus (11/5/08), "Democratic congressional leaders pushed a new president to the left--leading to the party's loss of both houses in the midterm elections of 1994."