The Daily Beast's Shapiro on "How the Media is Screwing Obama"

The Daily Beast's Walter Shapiro wonders "if the media's hyperactive coverage give the president a chance to, you know, do something."

Says Shapiro:

Now that we have created this 86,400-seconds-a-day expectation of instant political news, it is virtually impossible to return to prior laid-back ways of thinking about Washington. The problem, of course, is that successful governing requires far more than merely winning a particular morning's news cycle. But our foreshortened attention span gets in the way of long-term perspective. As a result, it is easy to get caught up in the fiction that the fate of Obama's presidency rides with the short-term direction of the stock market, the cleverness of Robert Gibbs' putdowns of Dick Cheney, or even the pace of appointments to the sub-Cabinet.

[...]

No president could live up to the oversized expectations that surrounded Barack Obama back in January. Not since Harry Truman has a president taken office at a more parlous moment. Two wars and the incredible shrinking economy would test a president with the temperament of Franklin Roosevelt, the intellect of Bill Clinton, the charm of Ronald Reagan, and the deviousness of Richard Nixon. Patience may be an outmoded concept in the media environment of 2009, but it is what Obama deserves in the months ahead. There is, after all, a reason why the Constitution gives a president a four-year term.