Is the New York Times trying to morph Obama into candidate Gore?
March 25, 2009 11:57 am ET by Eric Boehlert
How? By suggesting Obama is becoming something of a chameleon who reinvents himself depending on the political setting. The press spent most of 2000 depicting candidate Gore as somebody who was so unsure of his own political skin that he was constantly 'reinventing' himself.
Basically, that Gore was a phony.
Now check out the headline to the Times' article on the press conference: "In a Volatile Time, Obama Strikes a New Tone."
See, it's a new tone; a new approach. It's a new, different Obama. The Times leans heavily on that approach in the lead:
For just under an hour on Tuesday night, Americans saw not the fiery and inspirational speaker who riveted the nation in his address to Congress last month, or the conversational president who warmly engaged Americans in talks across the country, or even the jaunty and jokey president who turned up on Jay Leno.
Instead, according to the Times, what we got "was the professor in chief."
Note how the Times stressed that Obama last night was completely different than the Obama who addressed Congress just one month ago. Back then Obama was a "fiery and inspirational speaker." The Times considers this to be newsworthy.
First of all, it seems self-evident that presidents communicate differently when addressing the nation with a prepared speech before Congress (or on a TV talk show), than they do when answering questions extemporaneously at a press conference. Second, it seems self-evident that there's nothing wrong with presidents communicating differently in different situations. But the Times seems to think it's a big deal Obama acted one way at the press conference and another way in his Congressional debate. That Obama wasn't fiery.
But was Obama really "fiery" when he addressed Congress in February? That's not how we remember his rather somber address to the nation. So we went back and read the Times' next-day article about Obama's speech (Headline: "Amid Gloom, Obama Pledges Recovery"). And guess what, according to the Times, Obama wasn't "fiery," or anything even approaching that.
It's only now, when trying to hype the idea that Obama is changing his tone (reinventing himself?), that the Times retroactively claims Obama was "fiery" in February and professorial in March.
it really has been a rapid decline for the times. too bad, really.
what i can't figure out is their motivation. it's easy enough to see it with fox, they know the audience they're trying to attract, and they know the agenda they're trying to push. cnn, having seen its ratings decimated by fox, has to follow suit and try to out-fox fox. nbc is owned by ge, and ge is terrified of cap and trade and financial regulation.
but the times audience is mostly progressive, they aren't owned by a huge coporate entity, and their job over the years has been to report the news, albeit with an editorial slant to the left, and they've generally done it well. what gives?
I don't think so, or at least, not yet.
My guess would be that the piece took the form it did through the typical silliness of so much contemporary reporting where the daily political winds gain attention but the substantive matters do not.
These fellows may have been following Drudge and Rove and others on twitter or other ("Boring", "He mailed it in" stuff) for inspiration. I note they did follow the lead from Dowd pretty closely but Trippi's statement wasn't dissimilar.
But alternately, they may have simply been trying to write something which posited some new and fresh viewpoint on the Obama performance for little reason other than new and fresh quite regardless of relevance.
However, I will grant that the right is now working pretty hard to forward the notion that Obama isn't a compelling speaker. And, additionally, this NYT piece gets pretty close to forwarding the classic anti-intellectual framing.
I like that, that you took the time to simply go back and see if The New York Times described the President as "fiery" back then... and they didn't: I guess that's what you'd call "revisionism", isn't it?
This nonsense about micro-analyzing the President's personal bearing: it should all be prefaced by the question "Is he on the job at the moment in question?"
Even Professors don't act professorial, when they're not on the job (and if they do, then their social companions tell them "Hey, knock it off and leave the job at the office, OK?"