Obama needs to stop caring what we all write and say, a process he can start by abandoning the comfortable but incapacitating illusion that reporters are his friends. He can’t and shouldn’t rely on us to translate for him. We’ll get it wrong. And we’re the foulest of fair-weather friends. We read the polls, too, and when they plummet, we run. Yet until now, Obama has justifiably regarded the MSM as part of his base, as one of his constituencies. In fact, he thinks of himself as one of us: a member of the chattering class; a bestselling author; op-ed page habitué; student of the craft of writing, reporting, and analyzing. I asked the White House for the president’s daily reading material. Here is the list I got back: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, NEWSWEEK (a man of taste, this president), Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, “blogs,” Foreign Affairs, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN.com. “Bottom line is that he reads a ton,” I was told. Sure, we need the readers, but maybe that’s a few pounds too many.
The president’s problem is not that he is “professorial.” It’s worse: He’s journalistic. His conceptual and even operational home base doesn’t seem to be the South Side of Chicago; it’s the op-ed page of the Times, where he’s spent lots of time wooing the likes of conservative columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat. But grass-roots conservatives do not trust those guys (how could they? They write for the Times). And most voters don’t read those pages in any case. Certainly most voters don’t care as much about the “why” as they do the clear, plain-spoken “what” and “how.” They want know, say, what the federal government is going to do about the health-care mess, and how we’re supposed to cover 30 million more people and save money at the same time.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member