Different times

It's hard to explain to people who weren't there at the time the strange paradox of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Here was a President whose social climbing career and center-right policies pretty much embodied the hopes and dreams of the elite beltway classes.  And yet they all hated him. 

They were among the reporters, editors and columnists who were genuinely obsessed, in a weirdly personal way, with bringing down the Democratic president, acting as conveyor belts for the GOP and its vast army of Clinton-hating minions who were eager to peddle trash under the guise of news. For years, the Times was more than happy to oblige and to set the Beltway's anti-Clinton tenor.

"The vituperative tone and persistent bias in the paper's coverage of both Bill and Hillary Clinton were appalling to Lewis, who didn't hesitate to voice an alternative view that not only his immediate colleagues but almost the entire national press corps openly disdained," Conason wrote this week.

Today, with Clinton riding high as a figure of national renown, it's sometime hard to recall the toxic relationship that existed between the Times and the most popular two-term Democratic president in half a century; the weird  institutional antagonism that emanated from the Times' old W. 43^rd Street headquarters. It  was pervasive.

There's a faint parallel in the difficulty one has defending the equally elitist and militaristic Obama against the lunatic charges that Tea Partiers make against him. But the difference now is the Very Serious Punditocracy at least tacitly acknowledges Obama as one of their own.  Clinton never really earned that favor.