The Liberal Media is Deserting Obama

By Alan Caruba

The conservative media has been criticizing President Obama since before he was President and that hardly comes as a surprise, but there is a discernible trend occurring among the liberal media. They are beginning to abandon Obama and, if that continues, it will erode his base and the electoral turnout he needs to be reelected.

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, is one of my barometers and she has been backing away from Obama for weeks. In an August 6 column, “Downgrade Blues”, she opined that “Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.” It’s more like Obama has become Darth Vader, destroying the economy since the day he arrived in the Oval Office.

“When he had power,” said Dowd, “he didn’t use it.” No, Obama’s problem is that he did use it and most dramatically in his effort to impose Obamacare on an America that did not want it. Only a straight party vote in Congress passed it despite a massive 2009 march on Washington to protest it. That sparked the Tea Party movement and that transferred power in the House in the 2010 midterm elections.

The syndicated columnist, Eleanor Clift, a strident devotee and defender of Obama, wrote on August 9th that “Disappointed liberals are among Obama’s harshest critics. They feel he’s given away too much to conservatives and they don’t understand where his gifts of intellect and oratory are now that the country is looking to him for a bold plan forward that can take the economy out of the doldrums.”

Like so many liberals, reluctant to assign any blame to Obama, Clift ignores the trillions in additional debt that Obama added to an already tenuous situation when he became President. She ignores the failed stimulus program or his administration’s all out attack on the energy sector of the economy. It’s a long list of bad judgments.

As to his alleged intellect and oratory, Obama’s dependence on teleprompters became a running joke early in his first months in office. During his address on Monday, his “oratory” fell flat with both the media and the public. A string of clichés and worn-out ideas, plus a plea for bipartisanship he has never displayed resulted in a further plunge in the stock market.

A Spurned Prom Date

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, on July 25 sharply criticized Obama after the debt ceiling negotiations, saying “the president lost his cool. Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening. His appearance was suffused with that ‘I’m the only mature person in Washington’ condescension that drives everybody crazy. Obama lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents. He talked about unreturned phone calls and being left at the alter, personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date.”

Assessing the Monday address following the Friday Standard & Poor’s credit rating downgrade, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, wrote, “Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid—he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night—and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter. He seemed detached even from those words Monday as he pivoted his head from side to side, proclaiming that ‘our problems is not confidence in our credit’ and turning his bipartisan fiscal commission into a ‘biparticle.’”

In October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that asked if Obama was a moron. Turns out, he is.

In the August 9 edition of the conservative Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens’ column was titled “Is Obama Smart?” Concisely summing up the two views of the President, Stephens wrote “Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.”

“I don’t buy it,” wrote Stephens. “I just think the president isn’t very bright.” He concluded “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.”

For me, there is more than a degree of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes, but the really bad news is that Obama’s misfortunes are America’s misfortunes and the mainstream media is beginning at last to take notice.

© Alan Caruba, 2011