Obama Is on a Roll, But Is His Presidency?
The right-wing media isn’t right about much, not even by accident. But they might have one point: The press sometimes gives President Obama a pass when it shouldn’t.
By almost any measure, Barack Obama is having the best stretch of his presidency.
He recently had big wins on health care and his loathsome trade agreement, sandwiched around a controversial hit-generating use of the n-word, a singing debut and the securing of a surprising bipartisan agreement on the use of peas in guacamole.
This week, he’s teeing up a nuclear deal with Iran and a long-overdue effort to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba in what the networks are calling a “legacy-hunting” finale to his big momentum surge. More and more, the coverage of all of these stories has been less about the politics, and more about the angle of Barack Obama’s ongoing personal quest for acceptance.
The stories all have an E! network feel to them, as in: Barack Obama whipped the Republicans in court, sealed a deal with Iran, makes America’s tastiest guacamole and gets more web hits than Caitlyn Jenner. Can you say en fuego?
“It’s fun being Barack Obama again!” blared CNN. “Obama Defies Second Term Slump,” announced The Hill, noting, in classic “Nixon is tanned, rested and ready” fashion, that, “Obama appears more confident and relaxed than ever.”
Donald Trump praised Obama’s Charleston speech. The First Lady lit up the celebrity journo world when she released a beefcake shirtless photo of Barack as a young man. The president even rolled sixes as a sports fan, cheerfully chiming in on Jimmy Butler’s new deal with his hometown Bulls.
Political reporters have always loved the angle of the White House as Buckingham palace, the first family as royalty. And with each new president there’s always unconscious striving in the press corps for an American President-style plotline, in which the chief executive completes a personal psychological journey while in office, emerging at the end of his political trial not only triumphant, but happy.
With this administration, though, the personal journey story has been held in a perpetual state of coitus interruptus because Barack Obama the man has been under constant attack virtually from the moment the polls closed in 2008.
This president has had to take so much guff from the right wing – which has ludicrously painted him as a foreign-born Marxist and deemed him responsible for everything from McKinney to Sandy Hook to Ebola to the Baltimore riots to the (now sooner than expected) Rapture – that the press never got to scratch the Henry V mythmaking itch with this administration. Obama has mostly been too depressed and ashen for the role.
In recent weeks, the fog lifted. Obama didn’t just win big in the same Supreme Court that once handed the presidency to George W. Bush. He also scored at a time when the Republican Party is in total shambles.
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