NBC's Todd: Bill Clinton ‘Woefully Unprepared for 21st Century Media’

NBC News Political Director Sees Ex-President As Victim of 'YouTube Moments'

By Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/28/2008 12:01:00 AM

If there’s one thing that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) all have in common, it’s that each of the presidential candidates has already endured his or her very own YouTube moment.

Whether it’s a clip of McCain’s erroneous assertion that Shiite Iran was training Sunni group al-Qaeda in Iraq, or videos of Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., shouting “God damn America!,” or CBS News footage proving that Clinton’s 1996 visit to Bosnia wasn’t quite the Jerry Bruckheimer action movie she’d taken to recounting, the digitally fueled wildfire of unfortunate video moments has singed all three candidates.

But as NBC News political director Chuck Todd sees it, none has gotten burned by this new-media phenomenon quite like former President Bill Clinton.

“It’s fascinating: Nobody’s been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton,” Todd said. “I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media.”

Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today’s media environment.

When Clinton was running for president, Todd said, he and his fellow candidates could misspeak -- and even willfully obfuscate -- with relative impunity.

“It was like a Jedi mind trick with him,” he added. “It would take a few days for the media to catch up [and] by then he had moved on.”

But in 2008, Clinton’s gaffes -- calling Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war a “fairy tale,” inviting charges of race-baiting by comparing Obama’s campaign to Jesse Jackson’s, reviving his wife’s Bosnia trip for another spin in the news cycle -- sparked immediate blowback that seems to have caught him by surprise.

That’s not to say that the current campaigns aren’t media-savvy. If anything, Todd said, they’re all too savvy for news organizations operating on tighter budgets and with threadbare staffs.

“There may be more news organizations covering this [election], but nobody is going at it with the depth and breadth that major news organizations used to be able to do,” he added. “The campaigns are more sophisticated. They have more troops to spin than sometimes the media has to cut through it.”