Posted by
Mike Bates on Monday, February 23, 2009 12:14:44 PM
Americans increasingly see the danger in Barack Obama's scheme to
spend our way out of economic difficulty. So for the mainstream media,
it's all hands on deck to bolster confidence in Obama and his
decisions. The dependable Jonathan Alter reports for duty in the March
2 Newsweek, also posted on the magazine's Web site. Titled
"America’s New Shrink: Chin up, everyone. This president is well poised to bring us back from the brink," the article is loaded with happy talk about Obama and his incredible attributes. A few examples:
. . . Because my take on Obama, based on conversations
with him and his team stretching back more than four years and
extending into the White House, is that he has a firm grasp of the
psychological and substantive challenges of the presidency. Equally
important, his 2008 campaign proved that he possesses a superior sense
of timing. He knows that now is not the moment to cheerlead, not when
the financial players are lying dazed on the field. There will be time
for that, when the banks have been "restructured" (see, that sounds
better than "nationalized") and the credit starts flowing again.
. . . It's early yet and much can change, but the new
president is showing signs of carrying himself in a more naturally
confident way, with the right blend of traits. He's bold enough to add
a couple of zeroes to the conversation about spending, but humble
enough to utter those three most unpresidential words: "I screwed up."
Obama's confidence is the product of an unusual combination of good
early parenting by his mother and grandmother and his own search for
racial identity. "The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at
any moment," he writes in "Dreams From My Father" of a moment of
painful clarity when he was in high school. His white relatives, he now
realized, could never understand him. "I stopped, trying to steady
myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone."
After this confusing period, raising himself—and learning who he
was—became an enormous source of self-confidence. Faced with fitting in
nowhere, he learned to fit in everywhere, or at least make an attempt
to understand whatever new context presented itself. One critical
inheritance was his mother's anthropological eye (she studied
Indonesian culture). This open and nonjudgmental frame of reference—and
his own writerly detachment—give him a rare mental buffer zone that is
a great asset in the hurly-burly of the presidency.
. . . At a stop in Florida in mid-February, Obama said
publicly what he has confided to aides since early in the 2008
campaign: he could be a one-term president. "I'm not going to make any
excuses," he told the crowd. "If stuff doesn't work out and people
don't feel like I've led the country in the right direction, then
you'll have a new president."
This is an inspired psychological game because it doesn't sound like
a game. It sounds like real accountability for results. . .
. . . Obama has the chops to sell that approach,
starting with his already-proven ability to be the nation's teacher in
chief. This was FDR's secret weapon on the radio, and it can be Obama's
on TV and the Web. He's the smart, cool instructor, trusted by the
class to explain something important even if a little complicated. All
that's lacking is a bit more humor and a few catchphrases to simplify
the message.
Speaking of simplified messages, the mainstream media inundate us
with the view that Obama knows what's best for us and we should all
strongly support his policies because - altogether now - if he fails,
so does the United States. Columnist Alter has been in the Obama tank
for a while, contending last year, as noted at the time by NewsBuster
Senior Editor Tim Graham, that only racism would keep his favorite out of the White House.
Still, the current pro-Obama bias is breathtaking. But now we don't
have to worry. Our therapist-in-chief, as Newsweek deems him, is doing
all the emotional heavy lifting for us. He will, we are assured, "talk
us out of a depression."
Feeling better now?
Me neither.