To date the media have almost uniformly adored their man Obama. Now it appears there occasionally are exceptions to the rule. EJ Dionne went to the White House and got annoyed by the Obama administration’s manipulation:

The disturbing aspect of Obama’s effort to create his new political alignment is that building it requires him to send rather different messages to its component parts. Playing to several audiences at once can lead to awkward moments.

Last Thursday afternoon, for example, the White House invited in journalists, mostly opinion writers, to sell them on the substance of the president’s big speech on Guantanamo and the treatment of detainees.

Unbeknownst to the writers until afterward, they had been divided into two groups, one more centrist with a sprinkling of moderate conservatives, the other more liberal. (I was in the liberal group.) The president made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing. As is his way, he charmed both groups.

The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those aspects of Obama’s plan that are a break from George W. Bush’s policies, and to sell the centrist group on the toughness of the president’s approach and the fact that it squares with Bush’s more moderate moves later in his second term…

establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.

Obama may be a charlatan when it comes to a number of policy areas. He is, however, a deadly serious political person — his failing is that he has little subtlety. The interesting element in the Dionne piece is that liberals are beginning to see that they are being rather crassly manipulated by the administration. For example, it’s not just NRO but also the NYT that is noticing Obama’s overuse of the straw man rhetorical device to oversell his product.

We saw this coming within days of the election. It has now gotten ham-fisted and tiresome. Whether it will have any substantive impact on the media’s love affair with their man is unknown at this point.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 1:46 am and is filed under Democrats, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.