Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
The press finally falls out of love with Obama.
In Newsweek, Howard Fineman says it’s over:
The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero. President Barack Obama never had a chance with the Ailes-Murdoch crowd, of course, and it didn’t take the president long to offend the fierce left wing of the blogosphere. But now, finally, the MSM, which views itself as ideologically neutral, has found ideologically neutral reasons to lose patience with him: that he may be ineffectual; that he doesn’t know how to play the game; that he can’t get anything done. Exhibit A: the health-care bill. The Times’s Frank Rich, the astute dean of the commentariat, wrote recently that Obama has failed to “communicate a compelling narrative” in office and, as a result, “could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.”
Leaving aside for the moment the hilarious statement that Frank Rich, the erstwhile “Butcher of Broadway,” showbiz wannabe and non-bestselling author, is now the “astute dean of the commentariart” — wonder what David Broder has to say about that? — this would seem on the surface to be that moment in the movie when the hero realizes he’s been duped all along and now must take charge of the situation and expose the bad guys for who they really are:
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But since this is, after all, Howard Fineman, one ought not to take these brave words of independence at face value. And sure enough, one would be right not to:
And yet this collective falling out of love is great news for Obama. Calling it quits with the MSM is just what he needs. A breakup might even save his presidency.
Now that this deviously clever psywar operation has been revealed, Fineman goes on to explain:
For one thing, almost no one likes or trusts the media. The latest Gallup survey of respected institutions puts us down with the worst of the riffraff: banks, labor unions, HMOs, and Congress. If we attack you, it only proves you must have some redeeming qualities. That jujitsu even worked in an odd and unexpected way for Bill Clinton. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky crisis in 1998, polls showed voters were not only appalled by Clinton’s behavior, they were appalled by the media’s obsession with it.
Yeah, right: it was all the media’s fault!
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On the other hand, though…
Obama needs to stop caring what we all write and say, a process he can start by abandoning the comfortable but incapacitating illusion that reporters are his friends. He can’t and shouldn’t rely on us to translate for him. We’ll get it wrong. And we’re the foulest of fair-weather friends. We read the polls, too, and when they plummet, we run. Yet until now, Obama has justifiably regarded the MSM as part of his base, as one of his constituencies. In fact, he thinks of himself as one of us: a member of the chattering class; a bestselling author; op-ed page habitué; student of the craft of writing, reporting, and analyzing. I asked the White House for the president’s daily reading material. Here is the list I got back: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, NEWSWEEK (a man of taste, this president), Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, “blogs,” Foreign Affairs, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN.com. “Bottom line is that he reads a ton,” I was told. Sure, we need the readers, but maybe that’s a few pounds too many.
Got whiplash yet? If not, why not?
Your thoughts welcome here.
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