This manic inability to pause or to even seemingly take a breath has policy consequences. It’s hard to imagine that Obama’s zig-zagging on Syria is influenced by anything so much as an allergy to even a half news cycle of unflattering headlines from a previously doting press. Bad polls, bad press? Must mean it’s bad policy. But now the approach is even losing the support of those to whom Obama is catering. Politico itself today noted that Obama found “tone a challenge.” The same folks who thrilled to every fresh round of partisan bear baiting and nodded approvingly at a president whose political strategy was to explode his rivals now notes that it was unclear “what benefit the White House hoped to reap in launching a major fall offensive in the middle of a national and local tragedy that consumed media attention all day.” The intended benefit was to keep reporters tap, tap, tapping away at their keyboards around Obama’s story line. Obama staged an entire barnstorming tour this summer that seemed substantially aimed at scolding reporters for focusing too much on his scandals and not enough on his call for more government spending, and yet you wonder why he plowed ahead with his debt-limit speech. Obama seems desperately afraid to allow any news cycle to proceed without being in it somewhere. Whether it was talking to “The Pimp With the Limp” and other local deejays in 2012 or doing a Web interview this year with Zillow, Obama is always there, trying to bulldoze his way through the news cycle. This time, since the story was in the press corps’ backyard, it became all too much. A president whose relentlessness was once considered his cardinal virtue as a subject (and, by extension, a leader) suddenly became distasteful. Obama will make up for this by being more effusive in the aftermath of the shooting, rightly realizing he has some amends to make. But on Monday, we got a window of the mania that grips this second-term White House: the fear of being ignored. Read more: foxnews/politics/2013/09/17/what-is-obama-afraid/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz2ff2257ip
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:54:25 +0000
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