Is Obama Inconsistent Or Does The Media Just Like Us To See Him That Way?
Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)
Frank Rich remarks upon the country’s amazing about-face perception of President Obama in the aftermath of the health care bill (something that’s not necessarily reflected in recent polls). From Clark Kent to Superman in one leap over a tall bill!
Rich then goes on to reflect of the amazing “shape shifting” that Obama is capable of — one that leaves observers unable to accurately pinpoint the President, as evidenced by the variety of descriptions above. “We keep hoping that the Obama puzzle might be cracked once and for all, like the Da Vinci Code,” says Rich. Really? I don’t think so, actually. In fact, after having been a fairly close witness to the cable and blogosphere coverage of Obama for the last year I suspect the media has become rather dependent on the blank slate Obama provides and the public’s blanket tendency to hear what it wants to hear. Rich’s list reads like a run through of media memes over the course of any week of the last 52, each phrase generated by a competing channel (or a morning Politico newsletter) in an effort to own the headline of the day.
Rich further remarks on the Obama-as-Rorschach test phenomenon, which works both ways mind you, and notes that both sides of the aisle have also chosen to hear the most advantageous angle to any and every remark. What’s left out of this analysis, however, is whether the media is also hearing what it wants to hear, namely clicks, and adjusts the ever changing, ‘Obama as fill-in-the-blank’ storyline accordingly.
