Powerline: (h/t neo-neocon for title)
Most conservatives regard President Obama as, above all else, a radical who seeks fundamentally to transform the United States on all fronts. But the mainstream media has never viewed him this way. What conservatives see as radically transformative, the mainstream media tends to consider the next logical step.
For example, the mainstream media generally views Obamacare as a middle ground between doing nothing (or little) to provide coverage to the uninsured and implementing traditional left-wing solutions like single-payer, which many MSM members would like to see. And it generally views Obama’s foreign policy not as a systematic effort to decrease American influence but as a reasonable reaction to President Bush’s overreach.
What, then, has been the MSM’s Obama narrative. The examples provided above point us to it. Realizing early on that Obama could not plausibly be portrayed as the messianic figure of the MSM’s dreams, he became a cerebral pragmatist searching for the middle ground in the face of fierce and unreasonable opposition from “the far right.”
But then came the Obamacare rollout followed by the VA scandal. These scandals have given rise to a new MSM narrative, one that is likely to carry the day at least until historians write the “second draft” of the Obama administration’s history.
The new narrative — the first rough draft — is expressed in this column by Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, an MSM mainstay. The title says it all: ” VA scandal fits an established Obama narrative: skilled politician, lousy manager.”
McManus writes:
We don’t normally expect our presidents to pay close attention to how long veterans are being asked to wait for care in the vast medical system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs..
But we do expect presidents to appoint Cabinet officers and other aides who can run the federal government well — well enough, at least, to prevent full-blown scandals from erupting.
That’s what the VA’s long-running scheduling problems have turned into after reports that veterans died while waiting for medical care — and bureaucrats apparently manipulated records to make their performance look good when it wasn’t.
McManus finds the VA scandal “especially dangerous for President Obama because it fits into an established narrative about his presidency: that he’s “a skilled politician and speechmaker but a lousy manager.”:
He’s Both…sez I.
A knave for his efforts to transform America into the largest banana republic on the face of the earth, and an incompetent fool every time he tries to do something serious, even when that something is as fundamentally misguided as taking over the once-envied American healthcare system.
Obama is not a politician. The prevailing view, before Obama, of politics was that of one’s word being what one had to trade with. One made promises, in exchange for promises from others, and the trade resulted in a compromise. For this to work, the promises one makes had to be promises which were kept. Richard Nixon violated this many times, making promises which he did not keep. Even Sam Rayburn was a promise keeper.
Obama is one of the new breed, exemplified by Bill Clinton: say whatever you need to say to any given audience at any given time; memories are so short that you can say the exact opposite 30 minutes later and no one will notice.
One has to “heart” the politician, not listen to what he or she says. What they say has no content.
It is rather like the dadaist movement in art.
But it sure is tough on those who thought they would benefit from the Leader’s promises!
The choices should be:
(1) Fool
(2) Knave
(3) Traitor who knows what he is doing
Keep in mind that obama doesn’t make ANY decisions. Marionettes can’t do or say anything without their puppeteers.