by Rich Noyes
“Her heart is big but her solutions are sound; she cares more
for results than for labels, for ideas over ideology. If the White
House is worried about taking the country in a new direction,
perhaps it should send Reno on ahead as a scout. If she fails,
she'll say so. And if she continues to get it right, she may be
the one to lead the revolution.”From Time's July 12, 1993 cover story, “Truth, Justice and
the Reno Way,” by Nancy Gibbs.
No matter how many times Janet Reno protected the Democratic
Party's scandalous 1996 fund-raising schemes from an independent
investigation, the media insisted that she was really a non-
political Attorney General. But journalists' carefully-nurtured
portrait of Reno as a politically-clueless bureaucrat is being
undermined by her own politically-ambitious plan to become the
next Governor of Florida.
“She's a gritty, unorthodox candidate and I think she has a very
good chance of winning the primary,” NBC's Tim Russert told Katie
Couric on Tuesday's Today. “If blacks turn out, if seniors turn
out, and if the economy is still in trouble, I think Janet Reno
has a better than even chance of winning. Right now, she's a good
15 points behind Jeb Bush, but she is someone who's hard to
pigeonhole in terms of her various policies.”
Hard to pigeonhole? Reno is a proud liberal, as her sister
proclaimed in an interview with Time magazine for a gushing 1993
cover story (see quote above), highlighting the idea that Southern
liberals like Miss Reno are particularly ideological: “You weren't
a liberal because it was a fad or you were supposed to. You
weren't supposed to. So you did it from profound conviction.”
“Reno has never been shy about second-guessing the President,”
Newsweek's Bob Cohn and Eleanor Clift praised in another 1993
profile, approvingly citing an instance when Reno was even more
liberal than her boss: “In June, the day after Clinton dropped
Lani Guinier as his choice to run the Justice Department's civil-
rights division, Reno told reporters that Guinier was still 'the
best possible choice.' She even gave Guinier a Justice Department
conference room to make her case to the press.”
The national media's applause for Reno was matched by contempt
for her conservative predecessors. Crowning her with “full-fledged
folk-hero status” in a May 10, 1993 article, Time's Stanley Cloud
spun that Reno “was cheered on both sides of the aisle in Congress
and in her own Justice Department, where a succession of 25-watt,
responsibility-ducking Attorneys General had left morale lower
than – well, lower than an alligator's belly.”
The media insisted that fiascos such as the Waco fire that
killed two dozen children and her decision to force a six-year-old
back to Communist Cuba were moments when the public should feel
sorry for Reno. Discussing Elian's seizure on April 22, 2000, CBS
reporter Jim Stewart rued “that will be the bookend on Janet
Reno's tenure as Attorney General, that and Waco on the other end.
It is appalling from her perspective because of the true
compassion she has for children. If you've ever seen her around
children, you know how much she truly cares for them, and this has
got to be tearing at her.”
Not even her refusal to name an independent counsel to examine
any of the wide array of allegations of campaign finance law
violations by Clinton and Gore in 1996 shook the media's denial
that Reno was a politically-minded Attorney General. “People just
assume she's honest. Honest Janet Reno,” National Public Radio's
Juan Williams relayed on Fox News Sunday in 1999. That's still the
theme: “Reno enjoys a reputation as a principled leader who does
what she thinks is right,” Time's Tim Padgett echoed in this
week's issue.
On Tuesday's Early Show, CBS's Bryant Gumbel pitched the idea that
“a Reno/Bush match-up [might be] some kind of a symbolic sequel to
what happened last November,” adding that, “whatever happens,
Katherine Harris won't be around to certify the results, right?”
Of course, the national media will be on the scene, proclaiming
Reno's righteousness and showering the candidate with all the
benefits of sympathetic coverage.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
