Is the President Well Served by the Uncritical Press?

By
Joy McCann
– August 27, 2011Posted in: Editors' Picks

Fred Barnes argues in The Weekly Standard that he is not. And I think this is correct.

Even if this were the “good old days” of the media tri-opoly, there is little evidence that people would be buying what the President and his “enablers” are selling. Especially since the evidence is all around us in the form of under- and un-employed friends and relatives.

If a Republican were in the White House the mainstream media would be running endless profiles that shows how much suffering is going on right now. But that isn’t necessary, since anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, D.C. (which appears to be recession-free) can see it for himself/herself.

And Obama looks really, really bad to anyone who is tethered to the real economy.

In Washington, the plight of the jobless has been underplayed, and not only by the media. The White House has promised for two years to “pivot” to an agenda stressing job creation, but still hasn’t made the turn. On his three-day bus tour in the Midwest, Obama seemed oblivious to the depth of the unemployment trauma.

“Private sector job growth is good,” he said in Alpha, Illinois. In reality, it’s bad and getting worse. “The economy is now growing again,” he said. Barely. Obama said trade deals and patent reform would promote hiring, if only Congress would approve them. But it’s the president who has delayed the trade treaties, and both houses of Congress have passed patent reform measures.

The media routinely give Obama a pass on such stuff. On the tour, Obama insisted, as he has many times before, that he saved the nation from a “Great Depression.” So far as I know, the press has never challenged this dubious claim. But it is belied by the fact the recession came to an official end in June 2009, months before Obama’s policies could have played more than a minimal role.

Ask yourself this: If unemployment were treated by the media today as the top national issue, as it was in 1982 and 1983 when Reagan was president, would Obama be dawdling? Not likely. The jobless rate then was only slightly higher than it is now. But in those days, the press focused relentlessly on the jobless.

“If Washington policymakers were reminded night after night of the real unemployment heartache in America now, they would forge a bipartisan jobs plan immediately,” says Washington consultant David Smick. “Here we have a real crisis and nobody’s talking about it.” At least not enough.

A saying of a friend of mine touches on why the media disserve Obama by tolerating his habit of offering excuses for every failure or shortcoming of his presidency. The saying goes, winners accept responsibility, losers make excuses.

When the negotiations over a $4-billion “grand bargain” on spending cuts and deficit reduction broke down in July, the White House blamed House speaker John Boehner for walking out rather than acceding to a hefty tax hike. Who did the media blame? Boehner, naturally.

But is the public mollified by excuses? I don’t think so. Had Obama summoned Boehner back to the White House, eased his demand for higher taxes, and wrapped up a deal, the public would have been impressed. Obama would have gotten credit, just as he did last December when a bipartisan compromise was reached on spending and taxes. This time, the notion that Obama, as president, might have a responsibility to forge an agreement was lost on the media.

This last vacation in Martha’s Vineyard made the President look especially foolish and disconnected: the optics of having our putative leader play golf while so many things go wrong in the country and around the world were indisputably awful, and no lessons are being learned: the Obamas took two jets back to D.C., just as they had taken two to get to New England in the first place.

We’re beyond the Marie Antoinette jokes, and on to Nero imagery: the President is playing golf as the labor market burns.

(Barnes article via Memeorandum; more thoughts on the Martha’s Vineyard train wreck at Insty’s place, where he has a few more links thereon.)

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About Joy McCann

Joy McCann has been blogging since the spring of 2003. She's an accomplished editor of cookbooks, Harley-Davidson guides, gun catalogs, and interior design magazines. Her online publications include everything from corporate blogs to articles on spirituality.