By Christine Hall | June 16, 2009 | 11:58 AM EDT

Washington, DC is considered more hip whenever the power balance shifts to the left.  I didn't say that - Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts of the Washington Post's Reliable Source column said it.  Wow!  WaPo writers acknowledge that the snoberati equate hipness and style with leftist politics. 

"Our examination of the evidence suggests that his [Obama's] influence on the city's cool/host metrics may be overstated," the duo report.  They then give as evidence a little snapshot of city hotspots, star presence, fashion, and reality TV. 

Count me impressed that WaPo writers question the whole "left is hip" zeitgeist.  My only quibble here is that the Reliable Source suggests that people in DC no longer wear running shoes with pantyhose to work.  Clearly, they are not on my bus or train route.

By Tim Graham | May 17, 2009 | 8:09 PM EDT

Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan used her Sunday column to find racism in the exception taken to Wanda Sykes describing Rush Limbaugh as the 20th terrorist on 9-11 and hoping his kidneys fail. Givhan never actually detailed those outbreaks of meanness. She merely suggested that a white guy like Stephen Colbert could get away with it, but not a black woman:

By Matthew Balan | April 2, 2009 | 6:21 PM EDT
Lola Adesioye, British Journalist; & Kyra Phillips, CNN Anchor | NewsBusters.orgTwo journalists appearing as guests on CNN on Wednesday and Thursday praised “mighty Michelle” Obama for being “stylish,” “successful,” and for showing “an interest in wanting to reach out to people who may feel they’ve been disenfranchised or held at a distance from the power structure.”

Self-described “political provocateur” Lola Adesioye, who writes for the Huffington Post and the left-wing British rag The Guardian, gushed over the first lady during a segment on Wednesday’s Newsroom: “Personally, I find her fascinating. I’m impressed. I’m -- you know, I’m inspired by her, as somebody who can be a mother, a wife and successful in her career as well. So, you know, it’s been -- it’s really, really been a great thing.”

Eighteen hours later on Thursday’s American Morning, the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan tried to sell how Mrs. Obama could aid her husband on the international stage: “[She] helps people to get more of a human sense of the administration. And also, I think that for many people, there was, to some degree, a sense of being closed off to the rest of the world or closed off to those who are kind of outside of the mainstream by other administrations. And I think this is a way of trying to build those bridges in a way that is very non-confrontational.”
By Lyndsi Thomas | June 23, 2008 | 5:22 PM EDT

Screen Shot from Chicago Tribune Shortly after Michelle Obama’s appearance as a guest host on ABC’s the View, her choice of clothing began attracting media attention, turning political and general assignment journalists into fashion critics. NBC’s Today show claimed that "fashion icon" Obama had started a "frock frenzy." Before that, NBC's Lee Cowan, who has said covering Barack Obama makes his "knees quake," gushed that "Michelle Obama had always been there, dressed as brightly as her husband's smile."

Well today, Chicago Tribune fashion columnist .

By Ken Shepherd | January 8, 2008 | 12:12 PM EST

One has to wonder if Robin Givhan is still atoning for what the Left perceives as a grievous sin against Hillary Clinton: expressing distaste for Hillary Clinton showing a bit of cleavage on the Senate floor. How else can you explain the fashion critic's January 8 Style section front-pager gushing over Hillary's emotional moment at a campaign event in New Hampshire yesterday (emphasis mine):

For a brief moment at a campaign stop in Portsmouth, N.H., Hillary Clinton let slip a glimpse of uncontrolled emotion. In response to a question from an empathetic voter who wondered how she remains upbeat and "so wonderful," Clinton's voice cracked as she conceded that the nonstop campaigning -- and all it entails -- is not easy.

[...]

By Mark Finkelstein | October 13, 2007 | 7:29 AM EDT
Sure, Michael Vick has admitted involvement in dogfighting. But did you see how sharp he looked in that suit on the way to the courthouse? And yes, Mark McGwire bombed at those congressional hearings with his "I don't want to talk about the past" skate on steroids, but he's the epitome of what a XXXL Abercrombie & Fitch guy can be.

Inane as those comments are, they at least have the merit of being made by me in jest. But what is Robin Givhan's excuse for her similarly silly glorification of the fashion sense of another disgraced athlete, Marion Jones? For that's exactly what the Washington Post's style maven does in her column of this morning, "Marion Jones, a Success On the Glamour Track, Too".
By Ken Shepherd | July 27, 2007 | 5:08 PM EDT

The Washington Post 2008 campaign blog "The Trail" has an update on Cleavage-gate, a minor row that seems to have caught the paper's fashion critic Robin Givhan with a dear-in-the-headlights look while giving New York's junior senator a change to perk up her campaign's finances. [Update: Tim Graham has an excellent take on the matter, coming at it from a different angle than I did here. It's a good read. Check it out.]

As the Post's Howard Kurtz and Anne E. Kornblut note, Givhan protests that she:

...would never say the column was about a body part... It was about a style of dress. People have gone down the road of saying, 'I can't believe you're writing about her breasts.' I wasn't writing about her breasts. I was writing about her neckline.

No matter. Kurtz and Kornblut note that Hillary's acolytes are using Givhan's July 20 article to push-up fundraising: