Holly Bailey

Last week’s Newsweek starkly illustrated on its cover again just how much it’s rooting for the perpetual Obama-Biden campaign. Next to a picture of firm, smiling Vice President Biden were the words "WHY JOE IS NO JOKE: From Afghanistan to Health Care, a Vice President to be Reckoned With." It looked so much like a campaign sign, readers might have been unsure whether to read it or nail to a piece of wood and post it in the front yard.

Inside were several pictures of Joe Cool – Biden in sunglasses rocking the tarmac at the Atlantic City airport. The headline of the article was "An Inconvenient Truth Teller: From Health-Care Reform to Afghanistan, Joe Biden Has Bucked Obama – As Only a Good Veep Can."

This is not the way Newsweek saw Dick Cheney, obviously. In February of 2006, they made a cover story out of the Cheney hunting accident.

The Biden cover story by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas insists that Biden is getting over his gaffe-prone ways, not that they were "damaging" – what with the media trying hard to ignore them, unlike the Dan Quayles of the world. Biden was never a buffoon:

Exulting in the "awesome train wreck" that was former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (Texas) first appearance on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars," (DWTS) Newsweek's Holly Bailey spewed vials of venom in her September 22 post at the magazine's The Gaggle blog.

Her invective seems more befitting the pen keyboard of a leftist blogger than an ostensibly balanced journalist:

Mainstream media journalists delighted in joining left-wing bloggers in mocking President George W. Bush over his penchant for verbal miscues, often when speaking off-the-cuff. Of course, President Bush wasn't too prickly on this point and on occasion made self-deprecating jokes about his penchant for mangling the English language.

Yet when it comes to right-of-center bloggers playfully mocking President Barack Obama's dependence on the teleprompter, don't expect most journalists to yuk it up with conservatives.

Witness Time magazine reporter Michael Scherer's March 25 blog post with some thoughts on the president's second prime-time news conference:

Presumptive GOP nominee John McCain granted an interview to Newsweek’s Jon Meacham and Holly Bailey, and in the first sign of a long, uphill campaign with the media, McCain was asked how he could defeat such a "hugely gifted politician" in a "brutal year on a clinical level for any Republican to be running." Newsweek’s duo (or most plausibly, Newsweek editor Meacham) lectured McCain not to use a line about change we can’t believe in: "Watching, it struck me that fighting on somebody else's rhetorical field and offering a negative as opposed to a positive is not the most vigorous way forward." When asked about his critiques of the media, McCain buckled under pressure and pledged not to say anything critical about his press coverage.

NEWSWEEK: Sir, Senator Obama is a hugely gifted politician. This is a brutal year on a clinical level for any Republican to be running.

McCain: Um-hmm.

So what's the strategy? How do you overcome those two things?

Newsweek’s May 5 cover story professes to address Barack Obama’s "Bubba Gap," the growing chasm between the would-be Democratic nominee and white "working class" voters. Evan Thomas, Holly Bailey, and Richard Wolffe don’t so much report on the gap as complain about hateful conservative rumor-mongering. The authors complain that Obama is not just running against Mrs. Clinton or Sen McCain, but against every historical hobgoblin who liberals can dig out of a musty closet. Obama's not only opposed by George W. Bush, who hates pointy-headed intellectuals, but in Newsweek's historical imagination by "demagogues like the anti-Semitic right-wing radio priest of the 1940s, Father Charles Coughlin; Red-baiter Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, and race-baiter Gov. George Wallace of Alabama."

The Newsweek team explicitly tied these men to the people who posted damaging tidbits from Reverend Wright sermons on YouTube and the spreaders of Obama's leaked remarks on the Huffington Post about bitter people clinging to guns and religion. They began by lamenting the injustice that a black man, long so oppressed, could be accused of elitism:

Looking to sample the political opinions of regular Americans? What better cross-section than the denizens of MSM newsrooms! That seems to be Mike Barnicle's attitude, at least. The former Boston Globe columnist-turned-MSNBC contributor is guest-hosting for Chris Matthews on this afternoon's "Hardball."

Chatting with guests Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post and Holly Bailey of Newsweek, talk turned to the topic of Americans' desire for political change. At one point Barnicle made this observation:

MIKE BARNICLE: The force for change that's out there, if you talk to regular people, people like me, people like you, the idea that they want a change is a very powerful force.

View video here.