Bob Somerby has a very important post today on the pathological news coverage of Hillary Clinton that is already taking shape. It’s true that lots of people (myself included) sometimes feel like she is disciplined or calculating in her public appearances. But that’s no excuse for reporting that frames her every move as spin.

So far, the primary offender is the New York Times reporter Patrick Healy, who writes today that “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton strived for an Oprah moment yesterday night, the third of her presidential campaign, by sitting in a fake living-room set and fielding questions on a live video Webcast about her vote for the Iraq war.” Can you tell what the script is?

He later added that “Her answers suggested various personas that she wants to convey to voters: a hometown girl, a mother, a moviegoer, a churchgoer, a standard-bearer for women and a critic of the war.” How does Healy know that Clinton wants to suggest those personas? Answer: He doesn’t. He’s mind-reading.

The problems began yesterday with Healy’s report on a Clinton health care event:

The visit to Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center, which is just blocks west of Broadway (and is named after two neighborhoods it serves), was highly scripted political theater.

Reminiscent of the scene this month when Representative Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to be speaker of the House, children surrounded Mrs. Clinton and climbed over their parents in the audience. The event was intended to convey both her policy smarts and her warmer maternal side — a combination new to presidential primaries.

But as Somerby pointed out, all political events are “highly scripted”:

Readers, every time major candidates do public events, the events are, in some sense, “highly scripted.” It’s only a question of when a journalist chooses to put such a phrase into print. And in the case of Hillary Clinton, Healy knows his cohort’s prize narratives. When Clinton does it, it’s “highly scripted.” Those are the rules of this game.

And again, how does Healy know what “[t]he event was intended to convey”? He doesn’t!

The problem is that journalists don’t want to be passive reporters writing down what politicians said and did; instead, they want to inject their own voices into stories. That’s great when they fact-check the substance of what politicians say. But it’s far more common for reporters to try to deconstruct politicians’ tactics and try to explain their “real” motivations — a habit that frequently devolves into phony mind-reading, useless tactical critiques, and pathological narrative-driven coverage.

And where do these narratives come from? Columns like this one from National Review’s Rich Lowry:

When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential exploratory committee while sitting on a couch in her living room, she didn’t project warmth so much as a sense that she was desperately trying to project warmth.

As TV producer Steve Rosenbaum wrote of her performance on the liberal website The Huffington Post: “Hillary is struggling with words that are not her own. You can practically see the teleprompter reflected in her eyes. Every word has been word-smithed, every phrase looked at by a team of consultants.”

Welcome to the Hillary Clinton campaign, which will be the most blatantly calculated presidential campaign in memory. Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting, but it is Hillary’s lot in life not to be able to fake it well, so the scriptwriting and the consultants’ work show through. She seems to take the advice to “act naturally” literally, and the acting is always more in evidence than the naturalness.

The blogger and law prof Ann Althouse is even more stupid in commenting on a Washington Post report about Clinton’s answer to a question about her favorite movie:

She hedged on her favorite movie, saying that, as a child, she had loved “The Wizard of Oz,” only to discover “Casablanca” in college and law school, watching it so often that she memorized the lines. (Her passion for the Meryl Streep-Robert Redford classic “Out of Africa” came later, she said.) But she was clear about her own conviction that she can become president.

Can’t you just picture the robotic brain gears turning, trying to think of a movie that would say just the thing she needs said? Oh, why didn’t she have a “favorite movie” planned before she went into this on-line chat to humanize herself? “Wizard of Oz,” can’t go wrong there…. except it’s childish, and not very imaginative or distinctive. “Casablanca”! That’s a great movie everyone loves. Possibly more sophisticated than “Wizard of Oz.” But anyone could think of “Casablanca.” I need something that would have at least some individuality to it. Was there ever anything that ever stirred me? Damn it, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been sitting around like you cookie-bakers staring at screens, waiting for some damned moving image to stir some — what is it you people have? — emotion. Oh, hell, there was that thing…. “Out of Africa”!

The Hillary is fake meme is everywhere. Anonymous blogger “Not Paul Begala” at Blog P.I. posted this (complete with picture):

Notice how she’s been giving interviews in a living room setting, on a couch, with her elbow up on the armrest. This is supposed to convey a warm family scene with her kicking back and inviting you, the viewer, into her home.

Now, I dare anyone in Hillaryland to tell me that she’s just doing this on her own and that her political team didn’t consciously decide to portray her in this new way to give her the humanizing, “woman’s touch” look for her presidential run. It’s so obviously contrived it’s funny.

How could we possibly know whether she was told to put her elbow up on the couch? We can’t! But the belief of people like Healy, Lowry, Althouse, and Beutler that everything she does is calculated can’t be disproved. Meanwhile, they can frame her every move as phony.

Correction: William Beutler did not write the post at Blog P.I. quoted above as this post previously indicated; his anonymous co-blogger “Not Paul Begala” did.