Crimes Against Liberty (5 page)

Obama didn’t exactly discourage this quasi-deification. In noting Obama’s “pathological self-regard,” former George W. Bush aide Pete Wehner reported that Obama surrounded himself by aides who referred to him as a “Black Jesus.” Wehner noted, “Obama didn’t appear to object.”
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Fouad Ajami, a professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins, wrote, “Americans don’t deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.” Even JFK, argued Ajami, didn’t fall for his own mystique. “And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by teleprompter. . . . Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.”
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Even leftist radio host Ed Schultz reported the West Wing of the White House had been turned into a “shrine” to President Obama. “There are pictures all over... of President Obama. . . . It was just one picture after another.”
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OVEREXPOSED

Obama didn’t seem averse to all the flattery. To the contrary, the November 25, 2009
Drudge Report
featured a photo of him leaving the White House holding an issue of
GQ
magazine with his own picture on the cover.
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Observant bloggers also noticed that when Obama removed his suit jacket before delivering one of his many healthcare speeches, his name was stitched inside.
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Obama certainly wasn’t above engaging in shameless self-promotion. In his first year as president he gave 158 interviews and 411 speeches—way more than any other president. He held twenty-three townhall meetings, made forty-six out-of-town trips to fifty-eight cities and thirty states, made ten foreign trips (more than any other first year president) to twenty-one nations, held twenty-eight political fundraisers (compared to six for George W. Bush in his first year), and attended seven campaign rallies for three Democratic candidates (all of whom lost, further illustrating the counterproductive effect of his tired rhetoric).
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Obama’s overexposure began before he was president or even a presidential candidate, leading him to quip in a 2004 speech when he was a senator-elect, “I’m so overexposed I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.” But the coverage back then was small potatoes compared to the media infatuation with him as a presidential candidate and then as president. His name or face appeared on half of
Time
magazine’s covers in 2008. As of the August 2009 edition, he had appeared on seven
Time
covers since his election in November 2008. One of those covers celebrated him as “Person of the Year,” and another as the reincarnation of FDR.
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Newsweek
featured Obama on twelve of its 2008 issues.
⁴⁴

The
Washington Post’s
Howard Kurtz reported that during Obama’s first few months as president, the networks gave him more coverage than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months—and more positive assessments as well.
⁴⁵
“Obama marked his first 100 days in office with three hundred photos . . . all of him.”
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The broadcast networks were so in awe of our president they were willing to suffer big monetary losses to accommodate his self-indulgence. As Obama approached his 100
^th
day in office, the networks granted his request to air a news conference the following week, which was the important ratings “sweeps” week, to talk about his banking and auto bailouts. It was the fourth such episode, with the first three having cost ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX about $30 million total .
⁴⁷
Accuracy in Media reported that Obama appeared to be breaking every record kept on U.S. presidential press coverage. In the first six months of 2009, his name was cited in 1.1 million stories across the mainstream and social media and the Internet, constituting an average of 6,100 references a day. That was more than three times the coverage for George W. Bush or Bill Clinton during their comparable periods. Obama was also tagged on 216,000 YouTube videos and mentioned in some 15,000 blog posts a week.
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Writing about “Obama the Omnipresent,” the
New York Times
’ Mark Leibovich commented, “As President Obama prepares for his speed date with the Sunday morning talk shows, a familiar question dogs his aides: ‘How much Obama is too much Obama?’” Leibovich then answered his own question: “Even by the norms of his ubiquity, Mr. Obama has been on an especially prodigious media binge lately, pitching his health care plan seemingly everywhere but the Food Channel and FOX News.”
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All of this, wrote Leibovich, “sparked another debate over the O word—‘overexposure’—which has become a principal topic around the White House in recent days.” But that didn’t deter Obama, who even accepted an invitation to appear on
America’s Most Wanted
to commemorate its 1,000
^th
episode.
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Obama’s countless, redundant personal media appearances speak volumes about his priorities—and self-infatuation. His appearances on five Sunday programs to promote ObamaCare prompted Karl Rove to remark, “His time might be better spent praying for public support.”
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The
Washington Post’s
Howard Kurtz concluded Obama’s overexposure was a deliberate ploy by the White House. “Clearly, the White House has made its choice. Obama will hit the airwaves whenever he can, as often as he can, in as many formats as he can, any time he’s got something to sell. Which is pretty much all the time.”
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Kurtz pointed out that Obama had already done ESPN, Leno, the network anchors,
60 Minutes
, and a slew of other programs. “Then there was NBC’s day in the life, ABC’s townhall forum, the four prime-time news conferences, the comedy bits for Conan and Colbert, and on and on.” And Obama was preparing for sitdowns with Steve Kroft and CNBC’s John Harwood, interviews on
Meet the Press
,
Face the Nation
,
This Week
,
State of the Union
, and a Univision show. “And in case that doesn’t provide enough pop,” wrote Kurtz, “he’ll do Letterman on Monday.”
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Time’s
James Poniewozik, in his article, “Obama to Appear on Everything, Everywhere, Except Fox,” asked, “Should he just put a 24-hour webcam in the White House and be done with it?”
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Obama was oblivious to the diminishing returns his media saturation and endless speechifying were yielding. At one point he said, “Everything there is to say about health care has been said”—and then he promptly gave another healthcare speech. Amazingly, Obama regarded one of his cardinal problems to be his ostensible
lack
of communication with the public. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “If there’s one thing that I regret this year, [it] is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.”
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Baltimore Sun
TV critic David Zurawik skewered Obama for insinuating himself into virtually every square foot of the public arena, writing, “He’s baaack: TV Obama is everywhere—again.” Speaking of Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, Zurawik argued,

Yes, the president did indeed get the message from Massachusetts, but it might not be the one angry and frightened Americans meant to send. The message he appears to have received: Get back on TV like it’s 2008 and you are running for president. Because while this governing thing has not been working out too well during the first year, the one thing you can do is perform in front of the camera like no other politician since Ronald Reagan. Work it, baby, work it. As I have written before, when the going gets tough, President Obama gets on television.

. . . Last year at this time, as a media and TV critic, I was delighted at the thought of having the most savvy TV president since Ronald Reagan to write about for the next four years. Today, as a citizen, I am utterly dismayed by the way those TV skills have been used to paper over what appears to be a lack of vision and sustained effort from the man behind the video image.
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With kudos to Zurawick for correctly pinpointing Obama’s overemphasis on media and under-emphasis on governance, it’s not Obama’s lack of vision, but the nature of his vision that is most troubling, as we will discuss in later chapters.

Well into his second year in office, Obama still couldn’t get enough of himself on television—no matter the occasion. Obama agreed to appear on CBS’s
Early Show
with co-anchor Harry Smith in a court-side interview for the Final Four basketball games. As part of the telecast, Smith and the network’s NCAA analyst, Clark Kellogg, shot hoops with Obama on the White House basketball court. The interview and the “game” aired during CBS’s coverage of the Final Four.

With so much invested in Obama, it was unsurprising that some of his biggest media supporters tried to hide the unpopularity of his policies. For example, during the healthcare debate in July 2009, a
New York Times
/CBS poll showed that Obama’s healthcare plan was deeply unpopular: 69 percent of respondents believed it would hurt the quality of their own healthcare; 73 percent believed it would limit their access to tests and treatment; 62 percent believed it would require them to change doctors; 76 percent believed it would lead to them paying higher taxes; and 77 percent believed it would cause their healthcare costs to increase. How did the
New York Times
cover the results of its own poll? It buried the story on page A-17.
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Obama, of course, knew where his bread was being buttered. In October 2009 he invited a number of his favorite liberal media mouthpieces, such as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, the
New York Times
’ Maureen Dowd, Gwen Ifill of PBS, Gloria Borger of CNN, and Eugene Robinson of the
Washington Post
, to a two and a half hour off-the-record briefing. As some commentators noted, Obama only gave General Stanley McChrystal, then-commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a mere twenty-five minutes after the general flew from London to discuss national security with the president in Copenhagen.
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Obama’s self-infatuation didn’t falter with the public’s declining support. Toward the end of 2009, his approval ratings had plummeted to their lowest point to date, with 18 percent more Americans strongly disapproving of his performance (42 percent) than strongly approving (24 percent).
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Unfazed, he told Oprah Winfrey he would give himself “a good solid B+ for his first year in office,” stressing again that he had
inherited
“the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” And the only reason he humbled himself to a mere B+ was because “of the things that are undone. . . . If I get health care passed we tip into A minus.”
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SEEDS OF MSM DISENCHANTMENT

As enamored of Obama as the media were, it was not a relationship without some snags. As sure as familiarity breeds contempt, some reporters began to notice Obama’s unflappably high opinion of himself and that in some cases he was acting like a prima donna. The
New Republic’s
Gabriel Sherman wrote in August 2008 that the press’s flame for Obama “seems to have dwindled.” Reporters had begun to complain Obama was not transparent as he claimed, with one exclaiming Obama’s handlers were “total tightwads with information.” Another asserted the Obama campaign approached the press with a sense of entitlement. “They’re an arrogant operation. Young and arrogant. They don’t believe in transparency with their own campaign.”

Obama’s team was most defensive when reporters looked into Obama’s sketchy biography. “They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” said one reporter. “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.” The campaign reportedly went so far as to request Obama’s old friends and Harvard classmates not to talk to the press without permission.
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