America Tunes Out

Why is Obama such a bore? One historian blames Reagan.

JAMES TARANTO

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post "listened intently" to President Obama's Monday press conference, but only "for 15 minutes or so." That's 15 minutes or so longer than the duration of our own intentness, but we did listen falteringly to the whole thing. By contrast, as the president "droned on," Goodwin reveals that he "did something I never did before during an Obama appearance: I turned off the TV."

"Enough," writes Goodwin. "He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him? . . . I will leave that unhappy duty to others. I am tired of Barack Obama. There's nothing new there. His speeches are like 'Groundhog Day.' "

Goodwin is dead wrong about that last point, and he owes Bill Murray an apology. "Groundhog Day" was a terrific movie. Apart from that quibble, though, we feel Goodwin's pain, and we suspect most Americans do. The World's Greatest Orator is almost always uninspiring, condescending, self-aggrandizing, peevish and grim.

He is also, as Goodwin notes, ideologically inflexible: "There is not a single example on domestic issues where he voluntarily staked out a spot in the American middle. . . . Obama's default statist position remains unmolested by facts or last year's landslide that was a rebuke to his first two years. He continues to push bigger and bigger government, higher and higher taxes and more and more welfare programs."

And we are stuck with him for another year and a half. Goodwin and this columnist are professionally obliged to pay a certain amount of attention, but the rest of America can tune him out. And Obama himself suggested on Monday that they are doing just that, in answer to a question by CBS News's Chip Reid:

Reid: The latest CBS News poll showed that only 24% of Americans said you should raise the debt limit to avoid an economic catastrophe. There are still 69% who oppose raising the debt limit. So isn't the problem that you and others have failed to convince the American people that we have a crisis here, and how are you going to change that?

Obama: Well, let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury option goes. They shouldn't. They're worrying about their family; they're worrying about their jobs; they're worrying about their neighborhood. They've got a lot of other things on their plate. We're paid to worry about it.

I think, depending on how you phrase the question, if you said to the American people, is it a good idea for the United States not to pay its bills and potentially create another recession that could throw millions of more people out of work, I feel pretty confident I can get a majority on my side on that one.

Yet as blogger Ed Morrissey notes, Gallup found that even people who are paying "very close attention" oppose raising the debt ceiling, albeit by a narrower margin (53% against, 37% for).

One must make a crucial distinction here. People, even well-informed people, strongly dislike the idea of authorizing more debt. Obama is surely right to suggest that most would dislike even more the disruption he claims would result from failing to raise the ceiling. But that reinforces our point, and Goodwin's. "The public is not paying close attention," as Obama concedes, and even the segment that is, doesn't believe what he's saying. America has tuned this guy out.

Not everyone agrees Obama's troubles are the result of bad ideas and poor political skills. Writing at CNN.com, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer blames . . . Ronald Reagan--or, to be specific, a regulatory decision made late in Reagan's presidency:

But the current structure of the media has emasculated the bully pulpit. Regardless of how good a president is on the stump, it is almost impossible for him to command public attention, because there is no singular "media" to speak of. Instead, Americans receive their media through countless television stations and websites. . . .

With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the media were also able to shed the appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Every perspective did not have to receive equal time. On many television and radio stations, objective reporters have been replaced with openly partisan commentators. Any presidential message is quickly surrounded by polemical instant commentary that diminishes the power of what he says.

Making matters worse, on the Internet, presidents can't even fully control the time they have as they must compete with live blogs and video commentary as they try to share their message. Even within most households, the era of the single family television is gone. Now in many middle-class families everyone has their own media and is watching their own thing.

There are several problems with this argument. For one, the Fairness Doctrine applied only to broadcast TV and radio. The Supreme Court upheld the doctrine's constitutionality, in Red Lion v. FCC (1969), on the ground that broadcast airwaves are scarce public property and a license to use them is a privilege, not a right.

New media--cable, satellite, Internet--would have developed anyway, and the Fairness Doctrine would not have applied to them. What's more, broadcast TV networks have been remarkably resistant to changing the way they cover news and public affairs. The only medium that was transformed by the Fairness Doctrine's demise, it seems to us, is AM radio, now vibrant with political talk.

Zelizer also evinces an unattractively authoritarian attitude in bemoaning rather than celebrating the proliferation of media outlets challenging the president. One suspects his true motives here are partisan. His CNN bio notes that he is "editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration"--a book that, according to the Publishers Weekly review (quoted by Amazon), deals "almost exclusively" with Bush's "failures." Zelizer never mentions Bush in his CNN essay, but one suspects he is far less inclined to blame the 43rd president's shortcomings on the media than he is the 44th's.

Further, is it really true that the diversification of the media has diminished the president's power? Color us skeptical. The media might have been more uniform during the Reagan years, but they were by and large unfriendly to a conservative Republican president. Bill Clinton had to contend with talk radio and (albeit to a lesser extent than Obama) cable news, but he was able to command public support through most of his presidency. So was George W. Bush during his first term.

And there's a pre-Reagan example of a president who seemed as adrift as Obama does today. Prof. Zelizer, we're pretty sure you've heard of him. According to your CNN bio, you are "the author of 'Jimmy Carter,' published by Times Books."

Sarah Palin Is So Stupid
Yesterday we noted that Barack Obama turns out to have told a highly misleading story about his mother's supposed difficulty in getting her insurance company to honor claims for treatment of her terminal cancer. A reader calls our attention to an Obama comment from February 2010 that leads us to think his tall tale was the result of ignorance rather than dishonesty.

It seems the president of the United States does not understand insurance. "The blogprof," had video and a transcript of what Obama said while pushing ObamaCare:

When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won't name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company--let's call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I'd like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn't serious insurance.

Now, it's one thing if you've got an old beat-up car that you can't get fixed. It's another thing if your kid is sick, or you've got breast cancer.

Acme Insurance Co.? Meep meep. What Obama is actually saying is that he had liability but not collision coverage. Assuming the story is true, he apparently didn't know enough to get the other driver's insurance information to file a claim.

This seems as good a time as any to quote David Brooks: "I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president." Just don't let him drive.

Accountability Journalism
House Republicans failed yesterday in an effort to repeal the Bush-and-Pelosi-era ban on traditional incandescent light bulbs, which begins to take effect at the end of this year. The vote was 233-193 in favor of repeal, but the bill was introduced under a procedure that required a two-thirds supermajority. The Associated Press responded by quibbling with Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, whom it describes as "a driving force" behind the repeal effort:

"If you are Al Gore and want to spend $10 for a light bulb, more power to you," Barton said. He exaggerated the cost of most energy-efficient bulbs and neglected to mention that they last years longer than old incandescent bulbs, which give off about 90 percent of the energy they consume as heat.

The AP does not hold itself to the same fastidious standards, though. The dispatch's headline is "House Republicans: Down With Squiggly Light Bulbs"--even though the GOP is as permissive toward the squiggly compact fluorescent bulbs as it is toward the old-fashioned incandescent ones.

London's left-wing Guardian is even worse. Its headline is an outright falsehood: "Republican Bill to Ban Energy-Saving Lightbulbs Fails." Here's the sarcastic first paragraph:

A Republican campaign to defend America against a sweeping assault on personal freedoms--or energy-saving lightbulbs as they are more commonly known--went down in defeat on Tuesday night.

That's like describing the repeal of Prohibition as a ban on nonalcoholic drinks.

The Libertarian Case Against Legalizing Drugs
This columnist has some sympathy for the libertarian arguments in favor of decriminalizing drugs, but we've never felt comfortable getting fully on board with the idea. Blogress Ann Althouse points to a big reason why. She links to a video in which long-winded leftist Glenn Greenwald makes a case for legalization. Here's Althouse's description of the garrulous Greenwald's argument:

He loves the idea of pulling people into the embrace of government. When drugs are illegal, there is a "wall of fear" separating the people who are drug users from government. But if drugs are legal, "the relationship between the government and the citizenry changes for the better and becomes much more constructive." Tear down that wall, and these people who avoid the grip of government can be enfolded in endless programs. A torrent of ideas for programs spews from the mouth of Greenwald. It's such an exciting idea for lefties: There's a big untapped pool of potential clients for nurturing government services. Let the druggies come to Big Mother government.

Libertarians might argue that this would still amount to a net gain for freedom. We suspect they would also point out that they are against both antidrug laws and Greenwaldian nanny government.

The former argument is defensible, but the latter is irrelevant. Since we live in the real world and not Libertarianland, it's unreasonable to think that legalization of drugs would not result in at least some of the sort of government expansion of the sort Greenwald desires. Thus we continue to lean against drug legalization, in part on libertarian grounds.

Homer Nods
Barack Obama's economic team warned in 2009 that unemployment could rise as high as 9% if Congress did not pass the so-called stimulus, not 8% as we wrote Monday (since corrected). Worth repeating: Congress passed the stimulus, and unemployment actually rose as high as 10%. It still exceeds 9%.