FLASHBACK: Fawning 100-Day Coverage of New (Democratic) Presidents

Wednesday marks 100 days since President Trump took office for the second time, and the news media will doubtless be ready with report cards judging his new administration. Expect nastiness: Only last week, ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews likened Trump to Adolf Hitler, even as others at his old network are already floating the idea of “impeachment.”

Yet looking back at news coverage of recent liberal Presidents at their 100-day mark, it’s been a veritable lovefest. Back in 1993, Time’s Michael Kramer fawned over Bill Clinton’s economic program, calling it “the very definition of courage.”

“The legislative achievements have been stupendous,” Time’s Joe Klein exclaimed in a syrupy write-up of Barack Obama’s 100 days in 2009.

“In terms of mastery of the issues, we have rarely had a President who is as well briefed and speaks in as articulate a way as this President does,” CNN’s David Gergen agreed that same year.

And four years ago, liberal journalists were mightily impressed with Joe Biden’s big spending schemes. “As a candidate, Mr. Biden pitched himself as a ‘transitional candidate,’” New York Times reporter Annie Karni wrote, but “his ambitious plans, if passed, could make him a transformational figure in US history.”

And even though Hillary Clinton lost every time she ran for President, she received a flattering 100-days media profile after she became a celebrity Senator in 2001. “All agree, Clinton has thrown herself into work, often putting in 16- to 18-hour days, immersing herself in details of legislation, almost never missing a committee hearing,” ABC’s Linda Douglass cooed on Good Morning America April 12, 2001.

That’s not what you hear the media say about Republican Presidents. “Critics of the President say he speaks like a moderate and acts like a conservative, that he does one thing and says another,” NBC’s Matt Lauer badgered George W. Bush aide Karen Hughes on the 43rd President’s 100th day in office.

And during Donald Trump’s first 100 days in 2017, MRC’s Geoffrey Dickens assembled a set of media quotes featuring words like “poisonous,” “dangerous,” “divisive,” “un-American,” “insidious” and “weird” — not the vocabulary of the typical media honeymoon.

Journalists certainly won’t be any kinder to Trump when they review his first 100 days this year. But lest you think that such antagonistic coverage is normal fare, here are quotes showing the media elite’s very different approach to a trio of liberal Presidents, all pulled from the MRC’s archives:

Bill Clinton (1993)

■ “Great salesman that he is, Clinton can be viewed as a victim of his own success. His insistence on deficit reduction — and his cajoling of Congress to support a multi-year plan to accomplish it — is the very definition of courage in modern American politics.”
— Time Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, May 3, 1993.

■ “If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk away winners...Thank you very much, and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”
— CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather talking via satellite to President Clinton about his new on-air partnership with Connie Chung at a CBS affiliates meeting, May 27, 1993.

Barack Obama (2009)

■ “It didn’t take long for Barack Obama — for all his youth and inexperience — to get acclimated to his new role as the calming leader of a country in crisis....Rookie jitters? Far from it....For the past three months, Obama has spoken in firm, yet soothing tones. Sometimes he has used a just-folks approach to identify with economically struggling citizens. He has displayed wonkish tendencies, too, appearing much like the college instructor he once was while discussing the intricacies of the economic collapse. He has engaged in witty banter, teasing lawmakers, staffers, journalists and citizens alike. He has struck a statesmanlike stance, calling for a renewed partnership between the United States and its allies....”
— AP Washington correspondent Liz Sidoti in an April 25, 2009 dispatch, “Obama quickly, confidently adapts to presidency.”

■ “In terms of mastery of the issues, we have rarely had a President who is as well briefed and speaks in as articulate a way as this President does. He’s nuanced. He’s very complete....He’s taken it to a whole different level in the way he speaks about issues....”
— CNN Senior Analyst David Gergen during live coverage following Obama’s press conference, April 29, 2009.

■ “Barack Obama is a truly flabbergasting President. And in a good way — not the way some of his predecessors were. He’s not flabberghastly....He’s not the student who wears a button that says, ‘Smartest kid in class,’ but clearly he is, at least when surrounded by the White House press corps.”
— Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, April 30, 2009.

■ “The legislative achievements have been stupendous — the $789 billion stimulus bill, the budget plan that is still being hammered out (and may, ultimately, include the next landmark safety-net program, universal health insurance). There has also been a cascade of new policies to address the financial crisis — massive interventions in the housing and credit markets, a market-based plan to buy the toxic assets that many banks have on their books, a plan to bail out the auto industry and a strict new regulatory regime proposed for Wall Street. Obama has also completely overhauled foreign policy, from Cuba to Afghanistan. ‘In a way, Obama’s 100 days is even more dramatic than Roosevelt’s,’ says Elaine Kamarck of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. ‘Roosevelt only had to deal with a domestic crisis. Obama has had to overhaul foreign policy as well, including two wars. And that’s really the secret of why this has seemed so spectacular.’”
— Time’s Joe Klein in the magazine’s May 4, 2009 cover story on Barack Obama’s first 100 days as President.

Joe Biden (2021)

■ “By the time Biden ascended to the presidency, he had refashioned himself as a transformational leader — a president prepared to fundamentally overhaul the role of government in society on behalf of the nation’s working men and women....Biden came to office citing four major crises — the coronavirus, the economy, racial inequity and climate change — and with those emergencies came an opportunity to go big and bold and ambitious and to push through massive legislation with or without the support of Republican lawmakers in Washington.”
— Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker, April 27, 2021.

■ “As a candidate, Mr. Biden pitched himself as a ‘transitional candidate’...[but] his ambitious plans, if passed, could make him a transformational figure in US history.”
— New York Times reporter Annie Karni, April 28, 2021.

■ New York Times’s Elaina Plott: “[He] delivered what was really the most progressive address, I would say, at a joint session, maybe since LBJ....And yet he packages it in such a way, that he doesn’t give Republicans a lot to latch onto....Joe Biden’s brilliance in some ways is that its kind of boring, and not going to excite a lot of people.”...
NBC’s Sahil Kapur: “While President Obama had this knack for making moderate programs like the Affordable Care Act sound exciting and revolutionary. Biden superpower is exact opposite. He makes massive multi-trillion-dollar FDR-size liberal policy sound moderate and middle of the road, just by the way he talks about them...”
— During MSNBC’s live coverage of Biden’s speech to Congress during the early morning hours of April 29, 2021.

For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.