When you’ve lost the New York Times:
The press traveling with Obama on the campaign never had a lovey-dovey relationship with him. He treated us with aloof correctness, and occasional spurts of irritation. Like many Democrats, he thinks the press is supposed to be on his side.
The patrician George Bush senior was always gracious with reporters while conveying the sense that what we do for a living was rude.
The former constitutional lawyer now in the White House understands that the press has a role in the democracy. But he is an elitist, too, as well as thin-skinned and controlling. So he ends up regarding scribes as intrusive, conveying a distaste for what he sees as the fundamental unseriousness of a press driven by blog-around-the-clock deadlines.
Thanks, Mo! Now we’re getting somewhere:
Comparing Obama unfavorably with, of all people, veep Joe Biden, Maureen Dowd recently unsheathed her claws and tore off a small piece of The One — just a little scratch, nothing serious — but definitely sending a message to the White House and its increasingly hapless occupant. Among the taxpayer-funded lavish parties, the taxpayer-funded “date nights,” the taxpayer-funded vacations, and the occasional taypayer-funded photo-ops in the Gulf, Obama doesn’t have much time to read his press clippings these days, but this is one he or David Axelrod might want to heed before the entire racket is exposed as the sham it so obviously is:
More MoDo:
Sometimes on the campaign plane, I would watch Obama venture back to make small talk with the press, discussing food at an event or something light. Then I would see him literally back away a few moments later as a blast of questions and flipcams hit him.
Where Mo goes wrong is in assuming that Obama could have answered those questions had he chosen to. It’s far more likely, though — as recent events have shown — that the President simply has no idea what he’s doing, and never has had. At the behest of the press, the country elected a man with no resume to speak of, no record of accomplishment and no indication that he was terribly capable at anything, including basketball.
And to think Being There was considered fiction when it first came out.