Posted on 01/05/2010 5:04:09 AM PST by Kaslin
How favorable will press coverage of President Obama be at the end of this year?
Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on Comedy Central is often a leading indicator of sentiment among younger voters. Stewart last month waxed sarcastic regarding not only Democratic spending and deficit-creation, but also about Obama's personal style of implying frankness and then serving up bromides.
Following one set of Obama video clips Stewart cried out, "C'mon—are these the people we've really been waiting for? This sounds like the people we got rid of." That realization that the Obama administration is politics as usual is important, since Obama won because voters thought he represented "change."
Maureen Dowd's New York Times column is often a leading indicator of sentiment among older liberal voters. She wrote recently, "The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out. If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama's presidency so far, it would read: Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference."
Dowd may just be getting warmed up. In 2000, when taken to task for slamming Al Gore and thus hurting The Cause, she responded, "I was just teasing him a little bit because he was so earnest and he could be a little righteous and self-important." Hmm . . . does someone currently in the White House fit that description?
Washington's inner rings are starting to worry. One well-networked D.C. journalist, Elizabeth Drew, recently reported in Politico that those who once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama" and were key to his rise are now concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought." She wrote that late last year "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man."
Glenn Reynolds, the internet's Instapundit, recently offered a perceptive summary: "I think Obama's 'charisma' was based on voter narcissism—people excited not just about electing a black president, but about themselves, voting for a black president. Now that's over, and they're stuck just with him, and emptied of their own narcissism there's not much there to fill out the suit."
Psalm 146 offers a warning: "Put not your trust in princes." Hundreds of journalists in 2008 and early in 2009 did just that. Tom Brokaw compared Obama's inauguration to the overthrow of Communism in 1989: "I was in Prague when that happened. . . . The streets were filled with joy." CBS Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez rhapsodized, "A new day is dawning here in the nation's capital. . . . Does it get any better, or more beautiful, or more spectacular, than this?"
Most major television networks were over-the-top propagandists. ABC's Bill Weir: "Can national pride make a freezing day feel warmer?. . . Never have so many people shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity." CNN's Carol Costello: "It was like you're standing in the middle of these strangers, and all of a sudden you had a million friends around you. That's what it felt like yesterday." Andrea Mitchell on NBC's Nightly News: "The mass flickering of cell phone cameras on the Mall seemed like stars shining back at him."
ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN are not as important as they used to be, but we also have less margin for error than we used to. A big problem, as Arthur Brooks says—see WORLD's interview, "The next 100 years," Jan. 16, 2009—is that at the end of this year almost half of Americans will pay no federal income tax. Brooks worries that many will say, "'You know what? This is pretty sweet. I kinda like this system because someone else is paying.' That's what one side is counting on actually happening."
Three questions for 2010: Will lots of non-payers refuse to sell their votes? Will lots of evangelicals who supported Obama in 2008, hoping that he would be above politics, see that he needs a Congress that will stand up to his politics? I believe so, but a third question is crucial: Will mainstream press cheerleaders stop dishonoring journalism?
Funny thing - my lib friends and family are still defending him. All I ever get is, he ain’t Bush. Please God, wake these people up!
Unfortunately by the time these people wake up, it will be to late
There you have it - How this total incompetent won the election. Can't imagine any white person with zero's lack of qualifications winning or even being nominated.
His lack of class was apparent to some of us. These people did not misjudge him, I would say these people were blinded by prejudice.
No one's going to give a rats arse about what the man child or bomb belt Michelle do or say when they're smack dab in the middle of Obamaville.
Living your life on false hope and spare change won't get you very far.
Indeed. It didn’t matter if he was qualified or not. The only thing was that he was the first black man to be elected and that he was a democrat
One oblah-blah voter has said, “I’m not so sure I like what he’s doing.” Hey, it’s a start.
Gee, maybe, just maybe, if they had looked further into Obama's associations with the likes of Ayers and Wright, his lied about such, his completely hidden history and the stench of corruption that surrounded him (such as his wife's $300K job that was created for her after he became US Senator), the truth might have come out in time. But nooo, it was all just dismissed as right-wing sour grapes.
Pride is on the line with folks like that... its awfully hard to have offered your soul to an idea or man and then turn around and say, “man was I wrong”, especially when it was such an easy thing to do, to go with the flow... points you out as delusional and cheap.
Most major television networks were over-the-top propagandists. ABC's Bill Weir: "Can national pride make a freezing day feel warmer?. . . Never have so many people shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity." CNN's Carol Costello: "It was like you're standing in the middle of these strangers, and all of a sudden you had a million friends around you. That's what it felt like yesterday." Andrea Mitchell on NBC's Nightly News: "The mass flickering of cell phone cameras on the Mall seemed like stars shining back at him."
Yep - this was my take-away from the article...
My liberal, Obama-voting relatives said exactly that; they voted for him to be “part of history”. Not sure where they stand on him now, I don’t talk to them much.
Ping...very insightful!
And yet when conservatives pointed out that Obama was an unqualified fraud we were accused of being racists. So, welcome to the ranks of the great unwashed racists you liberals who are waking up. Better late then never I suppose...but next time LISTEN to those who are wiser than you are!
PR guru Axelrod and his best friend Wonder Boy Rahm Emanuel did the deed.......and both got top WH jobs.
It always makes me laugh when conniver Axelrod goes on TV with that deer-in-the-headlights-look, trying like heck to look "harmless."
Wily Emanuel duped the American electorate time and time again.
(a) Marxist Ohaha was presented to the electorate as a clone of Ronald Reagan. Rahm even had puppet Ohaha say to voters, "I want to be another Reagan."
(b) As 2006 Dem Congressional Campaign Committee Chair, Wonder Boy Rahm ran Godless, lefty Congressional candidates in solid Republican districts as "reverential believers"....and won.
Rahm softly/coyly speaks the language to appeal to American values, but this conniver is nothing more than a latter-day Uriah Heep. Like Uriah Heep, power-hungry Rahm feeds on others, and deploys self-serving strategies for his own self-absorbed purposes.
Dickens' ingratiating scoundrel (from David Copperfield) fits Rahm to a tee. Uriah Heep was notorious for wielding undue influence, a manipulative bounder who was always planning and plotting, ingratiating himself into the confidence of others. Uriah Heep was obsequious, manipulative, and wormed his way into positions of influence. Uriah was a consummate con man, and not to be trusted.
Translated into the language of the popular culture, Uriah Heep Rahm, positions himself as amenable to American values but is insincere in these feelings; he uses issues and crises to advance his hidden agendas and political ambitions
Rahm The Wonder Boy's motto: "Party First, America Last." The Wonder Boy is obsessed with party politics. Installing a permanent leftist majority of Dims is his game. This nasty toad evinces an utter contempt for US culture.
I notice C-Span is locked out of House & Senate negotiations on Obamacare
Obama: “ We will be the most open administration in history, and will broadcast all legislative negotiations on C-Span”
As far as I am concerned, he is still an empty suit
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