By William Powers, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 2, 2007

It doesn't seem quite real today, like it never actually happened: One year ago, Barack Obama was the king of all media. After just a few weeks in stores, his book, The Audacity of Hope, was in its seventh printing and sitting atop The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. He was playing large across the entire news landscape, from 60 Minutes to Oprah to the cover of Time, which put the words "The Next President" in big letters beside his face. One had to look closer to see the qualifier in smaller type: "Why Barack Obama Could Be."

	As Hillary Rodham Clinton has consolidated her lead in the polls, the mainstream has turned on Obama, and it's getting vicious, like a love affair gone really bad.
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Everywhere you turned, there he was, not just a politician but a pop-culture sensation, a "rock star," the new JFK. In a story about his book's runaway success, The New York Times noted that when he visited a Tempe, Ariz., bookstore, he signed and sold more than 1,450 copies. "When Senator Clinton appeared at the same bookstore to promote her book, she sold 900 copies, less than two-thirds of the yield at Mr. Obama's event." Pity the poor Clinton campaign, clearly in its death spiral.

What a difference a year makes. "The Next President" is looking distinctly like the next nobody -- in the media's current telling, anyway. As Hillary Rodham Clinton has consolidated her lead in the polls, the mainstream has turned on Obama, and it's getting vicious, like a love affair gone really bad.

The New York Times, which has been leading the retreat, did a run-up to this week's MSNBC debate, identifying Obama as the Democrats' problem candidate, much as Fred (Where's-the-Charisma?) Thompson was singled out before the last GOP debate. In a front-page story written by Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, Obama promised The Times he would go after Clinton more aggressively.

The reporters went to great lengths to show they were reporting on what the Obama camp was doing, not orchestrating the shift themselves. Still, the piece subtly vented the establishment media's own frustration with Obama, the growing mainstream consensus, voiced at countless dinner parties in Washington and New York over the last few months, that he can't play with the big boys -- or the big girl.

To truly understand high-end political journalism requires a secret decoder ring. The actual message of a story is often embedded between the lines or in a passing descriptive detail far down in the text. In this case, the operative moment came well after the jump, at paragraph 18: "In a 53-minute interview over a breakfast of boiled eggs (he ate only the egg whites), aboard a chartered jet that brought him here from Chicago, Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton had been untruthful or misleading in describing her positions on problems facing the nation."

He ate only the egg whites. It was a bit of zeitgeist poetry, compressing into six little words every conscious and half-conscious doubt about Obama that has been floating around the mediaplex. It was the 2007 equivalent of the old Chardonnay-swilling, Volvo-driving profile, with the same sexual undertones. Is a man who eats only egg whites really a man?

The Times said that Obama "glared and said no when asked if he lacked the stomach for confrontational politics" and said he would "not shy away" from making clear the distinctions between him and Clinton. The story suggested that it was now or never for Mr. Egg Whites: "A test of just how far Mr. Obama is willing to go should come Tuesday night, when Democrats meet for a nationally televised debate in Philadelphia."

As everyone now knows, the test didn't go too well. The debate was a lackluster one for Obama, and The Times wasted no time finishing him off. Less than an hour after it was over, Maureen Dowd's next-day column was online, observing that Obama had "whiffed" when Tim Russert asked him the first question. Real men don't whiff, of course. And Dowd left no doubt who had won the masculinity contest. Clinton, she wrote, "will not be soft or vulnerable. She will not melt in a crisis. And, unlike Obama, she doesn't need to talk herself into manning up."

Ouch. Can a eunuch be president?

-- William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com.

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