Wall Steet Journal writer takes on the Obama media

By JAMES TARANTO (Wall Street Journal, Sept 23)

Editor's notes: Taranto takes on the liberal media, revealing their changing bias towards Obama and challenging them on a wide range of issues. While our cut from this article is rather long, it represents about 15% of the article's content. We link to the full article, below. Taranto's article is typified with his words, here:

By now it should be clear that the only new idea Obama introduced into American politics was the idea of Obama: Obama the voice of a new generation, Obama the brilliant technocrat, Obama the postracial leader.

The reality of Obama has been quite the opposite. The fresh-faced young leader has governed according to stale old ideas. The dazzling intellect has proved inadequate to basic managerial challenges. We haven't even been able to enjoy the achievement of having elected a black president, because so many of Obama's supporters (though not Obama himself, to his credit) won't shut up about how every criticism of the president and his policies is "racist."

Enjoy the read -- jds

From the article:

If he's lost Margaret Carlson, he's lost Middle America. Sorry if you disagree, but somehow, to our mind, that joke just never gets old. Carlson, a fixture at Time magazine before jumping to the Bloomberg news service, personifies liberal Beltway conventionality, and she appears to have turned decisively against President Obama.

To be precise, she now thinks he's kind of a jerk--that's our paraphrase; as you'll see, she puts it considerably more gently--which means that her view of Obama has caught up to where conservatives were two years ago and Middle American moderate independents this time in 2009.

Carlson comments on Obama's famous face-off, at a CNBC "town hall" the other day, with Velma Hart, an Obama supporter who, employing an O'Donnellesque unidiomatic preposition, told the president she was "exhausted of defending you." Carlson chides the president for his condescending response:

"Now, as I said before, times are tough for everybody right now, so I understand your frustration," he told Hart, after rather clumsily praising her as part of "the bedrock of America" and before citing new credit-card rules and student-loan procedures as evidence of progress.

"As I said" always carries with it the implied question, Weren't you paying attention? "For everybody" telegraphs you're one out of millions, nothing special.

And "everybody" isn't suffering, which is the truth that gets to the heart of Obama's problem and makes his brushing off Hart as much substance as theater.

Carlson, ever the reflexive liberal, misidentifies the problem as a failure to wage class warfare with sufficient belligerence: " 'My entire focus right now is to make sure that the private sector is thriving, is growing, is investing,' Obama said. Obama voiced his own frustration at being caught in the middle: Business feels vilified by him, while workers think he favors business over them."

In truth, the relationship between "business" and "workers" is fundamentally symbiotic, not adversarial. A business-destroying government is a job-destroying one, too. (As an aside, is there a man alive credulous enough to believe that Obama's "entire focus" is on making sure that the private sector is thriving?)

Ed Henry of CNN has an interminable online meditation on how Obama "lost his mojo." He tries making excuses for the president, before acknowledging that maybe the most powerful man in the world bears a little bit of responsibility for his own political predicament:

To be sure, Obama has been battered by a series of struggles . . . . . . .

But then there have also been challenges of his own making, such as spending months of political capital on health care reform on top of an already-packed agenda, which led voters from across the political spectrum to tell me on this trip to Virginia that Obama tried to do too much, too fast.

We'll grant that the Gulf oil disaster was "at least initially beyond his control." But the idea that Republicans deserve blame for having "tried to block him at every single turn" is risible--and the ObamaCare example is the best illustration of the point.

Obama didn't need Republicans to get legislation passed, but had he not been pursuing policies that were both unpopular and reckless, he would have been able to win the support of at least some GOP congressmen. . . . . .

Also from Henry's piece comes this unwittingly revealing comment:

Chad Saunders, a Virginian who voted for John McCain in 2008, said he has respect for Obama's willingness to try to bring new ideas to the table--but he noted that the president is simply stuck in a toxic political environment.

"New ideas"? Can anyone name a single new idea Obama has brought to the table? . . . . . . . .

In justifying ObamaCare, Obama himself (or whoever writes his mass emails) harked back even further: "For the first time in our nation's history, Congress has passed comprehensive health care reform," said a March 22 Organizing for America email attributed to Obama. "America waited a hundred years and fought for decades to reach this moment." . . . . . . .

Note: this is a very long article but well worth the read. It is comprehensive in its review of Mr. Obama and substantial in its content . . . . . click and read here.