As the London Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley writes, everything the president does is cast as part of history. The president could go “seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. ‘Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,’ the New York Times would proudly report.”
It’s worth noting that there’s little evidence — yet — that Obama’s decision will actually help him with voters, voters who are increasingly less deferential to campaigns from traditional media outlets. (Indeed, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll has Romney gaining and shows that two-thirds of Americans believe Obama’s gay-marriage announcement was politically motivated.)
Still, it never hurts to have good press. In football, they sometimes refer to the cheerleading and noise from the fans as the “twelfth man” on the (normally eleven-man) team. The media are revving themselves up to be Obama’s twelfth man, and the time is coming for Romney to call them on it, with passion.
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