Letters to the Editor
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Actually, we *don't* know that
From the article:
We know, for instance, that Hillary Clinton is the sort of politician who will plant a question in the audience, get caught and then not apologize. We know that Mitt Romney is the sort of politician who structures his life like a major corporation and sees politics as a marketing problem. We know that Barack Obama is committed to the untested, and perhaps foolhardy, notion that he can move the nation beyond political partisanship.
Funny thing, though: If indeed we do *know* any of these things, we only "know" them via what's been reported, and how those plotlines have been reported.
As pointed out by the first letter, you're making a huge leap of logic that Hillary was directly involved in that PR blunder. We don't *know* how Romney truly "views politics as a marketing problem" (whatever the hell that means) -- that's just the impression some reporters gave us when they were covering the horse race aspects of the campaign (which may or may not include taking talking points delivered by Romney or his staffers!). And Obama's desire to appeal to something beyond partisanship was nothing if not a strategy to define his candidacy on his terms lest he get pigeonholed into some sort of caricature that would have otherwise been delivered to use via the typical horse race coverage.
Campaigns are huuuuuuuuuuge organizations, mostly about as organized as an ill child's diaper. But according to the campaign-focused reporting we've been force-fed, we're supposed to hold the candidate accountable for every single word and action taken on his/her behalf by a coterie of often borderline-competent and/or sleep deprived lackeys. All the while, very little if any in-depth coverage is given to the policies each candidate proposes, and even less to the gross inconsistencies, non-answers, and doublespeak they expect us to buy in their now-required "everyone must love me" approach to politics. And this is supposed to help us decide who should be elected as the de facto leader of the world?
At the end of the day, campaign coverage all becomes this unbelievably futile exercise in circular logic, and then y'all wonder why the vast majority of Americans tune this crap out.