Obama Economic Speech One Insult Too Many For Media
Posted 06/15/2012 07:11 PM ET
Disinformation: The White House drum roll before last week's nearly hourlong, more-of-the-same economic speech was apparently the last straw for the president's mainstream media friends. It was one insult too much.
Getting heckled and interrupted by a reporter in the White House Rose Garden the way the president was on Friday, during his statement on unilaterally granting immunity to the children of illegal aliens, may be bad.
But President Obama's new problems with the press corps, an institution whose support has been more valuable than that of any other, go much deeper than that.
It's true there were some reporters continuing to play the lapdog after Obama's economic speech at a Cleveland community college on Thursday, like the Washington Post's description that it "at times had the ring of a State of the Union address" and was "the most vigorous defense of his presidency to date ..."
But the complaints of disappointment and being lied to in the aftermath of perhaps the worst speech of his presidency make the ever-worsening month of June even worse for the president.
To lose Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, of all people, speaks volumes. Alter's book on the first year of the Obama presidency, "The Promise," is sycophantic in the extreme, extolling Obama's ability during meetings with advisers to "succinctly summarize each side's most logical arguments" as if it were the mark of genius.
"For both outside advisers and close aides," Alter wrote, "the president's ability to extract meaning from a wide-ranging discussion was one of his most impressive qualities."
Last Thursday, Alter declared on MSNBC that he had witnessed "one of the worst speeches I've ever heard Barack Obama make."
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He later tweeted: "He needs a sharper, more cogent message with some memorable lines" and assuring those displeased with his barbs, "I ain't walking my criticism back."
Last September, Washington Post political analyst Dana Milbank took an almost lighthearted tone after the president's earnestly-delivered "jobs bill" speech to Congress, noting that "so many in the audience thought it was a big, fat joke" and declaring "the irrelevancy of the Obama presidency."
After Thursday's speech, Milbank was dead adamant, charging that "the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy." (See column here.)
We've repeatedly warned of the dangers of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending if those massive entitlements are left unfixed, and this issue formed the crux of Milbank's dissatisfaction with Obama.
"Despite his claim that 'both parties have laid out their policies on the table,'" Milbank charged, "Obama has made no serious proposal to fix the runaway entitlement programs that threaten to swamp the government's finances."
