Stop boring the press!
Hey, remember when Barack Obama was the presidential candidate that you most wanted to have a beer with?
Back in February, Hillary Clinton was tossing that critique around, via CBS News' campaign blog:
During a campaign stop Monday night, Hillary Clinton warned a crowd of several thousand supporters that picking a president should be based more on experience than popularity, pointing out that President George W. Bush is a product of voters choosing based a president based on popularity.
“We need to know as specifically as possible what our next president intends to do. We don’t need a leap of faith, we don’t need to have a beer with the next president, we had that president,” she said.
"I’d be happy to have a beer too we can talk about what we’re going to do to solve our problems.”
Now, he's the arugula-gobbling elitist who'd rather have high-end dinner parties than carbs. This annoying Newsweek cover story last week summarized that notion by giving whole column inches over to apparently non-elitist New York Times columnists who explained why Obama, who we once wanted to kick back with, is too shi shi for us:
Obama has had the misfortune to run for the presidency in an age when reporters are watching, it seems, every time the candidate picks up a fork or orders a meal. Here is The New York Times's Maureen Dowd on Obama's efforts to appear to be a regular guy through carbohydrate consumption: "In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage, and a Philly cheesesteak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheesesteak. But this is clearly a man who can't wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites …"
For real, why report news when you can just re-print something that some columnist imagined up between her three-martini lunch that she expensed with her failing media empire's accountants and her deadline?
How did we get here? Ironically, it is Karl Rove in the same issue of Newsweek who sums up the problem for Obama:
Your stump speech is sounding old and out of touch. You made a mistake by not giving the bored press (and voters) something new last Tuesday when you lost Pennsylvania.
You see, the press is bored. They've expended all of their creative energies on this never-ending campaign, and now there's nothing else to write about. In February they dwelled on how Obama was too cool and fun to hang around with. Now they're going the other way, and making the story into one about how you, the supposed voter, aren't cool enough to hang out with Senator Obama.
The lesson: basically, don't believe anything you read or see on TeeVee ever again.
