Our wall-to-wall coverage of HILLARY’S LAUGH is not complete without a link to Slate’s John Dickerson, who also chimed in on the subject over the weekend. (I must have missed a meeting.) He makes some similar points to others, but his thought here strikes me as especially perceptive, perhaps even precognitive (emphasis mine):
If bwah-ha-ha is a strategy, an aide should stop it now, before someone gets hurt. Alternatively, the campaign should indignantly mention the criticism of the laugh in a fund-raising letter, the way aides did the Washington Post article about Clinton’s cleavage.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. What was the turnaround time from Givhan to “gimme” for the cleavage story? A day? Two?
UPDATE: I sort of get the rage of the commenters, and that’s the point. In the new calculus of fundraising, outrage –> open wallets. If Hillary makes money off of this coverage, the “laugh strategy” will turn out to be a winner after all. You could argue that the press is the ultimate loser. Still, I must ask the crowd: How would you have reporters talk about Hillary’s debate/interview style? (No fair arguing that we should be off covering something else entirely instead, let’s just stipulate that there is ALWAYS something more worthy coverage than anything that actually appears in print, and talk specifically about her style of communication, of which the laugh is a part.)* Should we not mention the laugh at all? Mention it within the context of other candidate’s debate tricks? We’ve dissected Bush’s “isms”, Cheney’s growl, and she appears to deploy the laugh as particular (if not conscious) response to specific situations. So… what to do?
*On second thought, saying we should be covering something else entirely is a perfectly fair thing to say. I happen to think that candidate’s style deserves at least some coverage — Obama’s eloquence, Mitt’s stiffness, etc — but I see the point of those who think otherwise.