It’s been a great week for ABBA fans, hasn’t it? Their catalog hasn’t been this relevant since Pierce Brosnan warbled his way through Mamma Mia! First, Jim DeMint says that the health-care debate will be Barack Obama’s Waterloo, and now Rush Limbaugh riffs on that to point out that Obama’s flop in the prime-time presser will be the media’s Waterloo, too.  He makes a better point than DeMint, too:

Rush has this dead-on correct, especially in the weird promotion of the press conference.  Perhaps they did the same thing for George Bush, who held very few prime-time press conferences in eight years, but I don’t recall it.  The media, especially the televised media, appear to have hung their economic fortunes on Obama.

US News said that the print media would turn more adversarial in this press conference, though, and that may have been true.  None of the questions were softballs of the Jeff Zeleny “what do you find most enchanting about being you” type from just three months ago.  Lynn Sweet knew what she was doing when she offered Obama enough bait to make a foolish tactical and political mistake in giving his confessed ignorant opinion of a incident in Cambridge, which overwhelmed his health-care message and had the White House backpedaling the next day.  In that instant, Sweet gave Obama enough room to implode, and Obama naively obliged.

The media have a long way to go before they can regain enough credibility to become Obama’s Waterloo, but that’s a start.  When the networks start refusing to carry Obama live in prime time, put away the countdown clocks promoting him, and increase their pressure for real answers, then perhaps they can adopt the mantle of independence.