The only one who has had a gloved treatment has been McCain.
His one a day gaffes, hell the dude can't even read a speech properly has been IGNORED. He goes around untouched as of now.

That's the truth.

and dont you find it fascinating that so few care about this?!?!

I don't think it's that nefarious. I think the press likes Obama because he is young, he is "good copy" and a "good story," he was the underdog, he is handsome, charming, and so forth.

I also think the press, which is dominated by white men, has a double standard when it comes to racism and sexism. Racism is "easier" for them to abhor than sexism. Ensconsed in their comfortable upper middle class to upper class lives, they don't have that much interaction with African Americans, other than the few token reporters, or as subordinates in their workplaces and elsewhere. But women are their wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, in-laws, etc. Sexism is much more deeply ingrained in their personal lives than racism ever was, and now, at least "officially," racism is completely taboo. And, some of these journalists actually have a sense of history (Tweety, Brokaw), and certainly do not want to see themselves as being on the George Wallace/Bull Connors side of the race issue. Obama consciously models his speeches after MLK, who is perhaps the one African American leader that white America, and, hence, these journalists are comfortable with.

I also think these white male reporters have been influenced by the world of sports, where African Americans have been accepted as mainstream in many instances. Again, the reporters with the sense of history want to be on the side of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and West Texas State, not Dixie Walker and Adolph Rupp. And, since at least Michael Jordan, it has been "OK" for the leading athlete in a sport, or even sports in general, to be a person of color. Bi-racial and multi-racial athletes like Dereck Jeter and Tiger Woods, who are accepted pretty much without question by white America, provide, perhaps, even closer analogies to Obama. But there is no woman equivalent to MLK, or to Jackie Robinson, Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods. All of the leading feminists of the last 50 years are still seen as controversial. And, while some women athletes are seen as pioneers and admired as such, there is really no comparison, in the minds of white, male sports fans, between them and the male athletes of color mentioned above.

There is simply no consensus, at least among powerful white men, even at the level of what is official policy, that gender bias is as absolutely wrong and intolerable as racial bias.

When one reaches the level of everyday practice, the discrepancy is even more glaring. Comments about Hillary that embody a misogynist viewpoint don't even register with the press as troublesome, while everything said about Obama is filtered through a careful, PC control system, to avoid even the impression of racism. In addition, the Obama campaign has screamed "racism" at the drop of a hat, inhibiting the media, and the Clinton campaign, even more.

Nor is this the end of it. Many of the reporters buy into the fake, David Broder meme of the Clintons "trashing" the Washington, DC that they live in and love. The source of the meme goes well beyond Broder, to the Republicans in the Congress who shut down the government, and impeached the president, simply because they could not stand the fact that a Democrat could win election and re-election to that office. And, beyond that, to the smearing of the Clintons by the extra-official Republican slime machine at least as far back as 1992. It has now become an almost impossible narrative to resist for many in the media that the Clintons are sleazy, will do anything to win, are scandal ridden, corrupt, secretive, etc. The actual facts of the matter, that the Clinton Administration and the Clintons themselves, for all the tens if not hundreds of millions of government and private money spent investigating them, have not been implicated in any major wrongdoing, and certainly less so than either the Reagan/Bush I administrations or the Bush II Administration, no longer even seems to matter.

So, no, I don't think there is any conscious decision to favor Obama.  Nor do I think Obama has promised them anything. Nor do I think that, as in the General Election, the reporters are favoring the more conservative side because of their won class bias or that of their corporate masters. Rather, I think a whole set of issues explains the difference in treatment the two Democrats get. Of course, none of that makes it right. . .

her attacks - stuff like "He outspent us two to one" hardly personal.