Those of us who lived through the horrific press coverage of the 2000 Gore campaign will find the Spite Girl whineage of CBS’ Dean Reynolds all too familiar (h/t John Cole):

The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn’t be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it’s true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who’ve been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

That’s right: Dean Reynolds is having a hissy fit because the Obama campaign doesn’t buddy up to the press and spoon-feed them stuff, like the ribs John McCain famously serves the press at his ranch. Then again, the Obama campaign doesn’t kick people off the plane for writing harsh pieces on them, the way McCain’s campaign does (just ask Maureen Dowd).

Good grief, you could swap the words "Gore" and "Bush" for "Obama" and "McCain" and you’d get a pretty close approximation of a 2000 NYT piece by Katharine Seelye.

It also puts me in mind of how the Reagan-Bush-era White House Travel Office head, Billy Dale, used a iron-fist-in-velvet-glove method similar to McCain’s to keep the press in line. It worked so well that when the incoming Clinton administration tried to nail Dale for having over $50,000 of Travel Office funds in his personal bank account, the media took his side and bashed the Clintons for it, turning them into the villains of the White House Travel Office scandal:

The services provided apparently went well beyond the mere booking of fares and rooms. Dale and his associates, by many accounts, became federally funded valets to the travelling journalists, servants who knew the imperial tastes of their masters, from the best hotels right down to the premium brand of whiskey each one preferred. White House press travel perks were mentioned in stories and columns in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, and The Washington Monthly, all of which alluded to a more questionable travel office practice — looking the other way when reporters avoid taxes and duties on goods from around the world. Kenneth Walker, a former White House correspondent for ABC News, wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that many White House journalists "point proudly to expensive collectibles and furnishings in their homes that were collected from around the world and on which they paid not one penny of duty. . . . All this was abetted by the White House travel office." So far, no major news organization has published an investigation that names names about who did what for whom in the White House press corps. More recently, in a deeply sympathetic profile of Dale that appeared in the February 1996 Washingtonian magazine, it was suggested that the travel office director knew intimate secrets about his journalistic pals — including their trips to foreign brothels and their sexual liaisons. It’s not necessary to believe such lurid suggestions, however, to understand the fierce loyalty Dale’s devotion engendered.

And indeed, when Dale and his colleagues were suddenly fired, the reaction of the White House press was ferocious. ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume was speaking for many when he expressed his scorn in the September 1994 American Spectator: "The advance men who composed most of the old travel office had been doing it for years and their experience was an asset the Clinton White House inherited but was too obtuse or arrogant to recognize." More than a year later, on January 7, Hume noted on an ABC broadcast that the travel office was something "that the press cares a lot about . . . you might not want to mess with it too much because there’d be a lot of press interest, as there was."

Dean Reynolds apparently yearns for a return to the good old days of Billy Dale.