Obama Blames Right For Attacks on Wife
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Senator Barack Obama blamed the right-wing media for attacks on his wife, Michelle, that have driven up her negative ratings.
In an interview with Glamour magazine , Mr. Obama pointed to “the conservative press — Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk,” and said they “went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way” and that they “treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans.”
He suggested that spouses be off limits, calling them “civilians” and saying “they didn’t sign up for this.”
A survey in late May by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that 22 percent of the public had negative views of Mrs. Obama, while 16 percent had negative views of Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee. Both had about the same level of favorable ratings, with 44 percent for Mrs. Obama and 42 percent for Mrs. McCain.
In the interview, to be published in the magazine this fall, Mr. Obama also told Cindi Leive, the editor of the magazine, that his wife is “ironically the most quintessentially American woman I know. She grew up in a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ family.”
News coverage of Mrs. Obama far outweighed that of Mrs. McCain in the first half of the year. The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s Campaign Coverage Index found that in that period, Mrs. Obama appeared as a significant newsmaker in 102 stories while Mrs. McCain appeared in 28 stories.
Another Pew survey last month found that among Republicans, 39 percent had a negative view of Mrs. Obama, while 26 percent of Democrats had a negative view of Mrs. McCain.
“If you start being subjected to rants by Sean Hannity and the like, day in day out, that’ll drive up your negatives,” Mr. Obama told Glamour. He said it was not the McCain campaign itself that was responsible for the attacks but the “apparatus of conservative columnists, blogs and the like.”
Source: New York Times
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