Is Barack Obama overexposed?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
18 Comments
My suggestion would be to either increase the shutter speed or maybe, if there seem to be a lack of depth of focus, maybe dial up the f-stop to close that aperture a little.
That should clear up the argument right quick!
/photog
Seems about right.
or stop letting himself be photographed at the beach – the glare from the water is a problem
No. IMHO, it is impossible for a president to be over-exposed, as long as each appearance has some originality to it.
The George W. Bush Propaganda Tour to sell Social Security Privatization was over-exposure and the news networks even stopped covering it because it was all so staged and boring and predictable. No one wanted to watch that fake reality show.
Obama should not listen to the concern trolls who are all worried about “over-exposure.” Frankly, I’d like to see him get on fun, casual, more candid-type shows where he can remind all of us why we voted for him. Since he’s become president he’s become so much more detached and dull. Spend some time with John Stewart or the ladies of The View. I miss that.
To add:
He’s the first really “cool” president of my lifetime (I’m 38.) Even do a limited guest-host role on SNL. And do some racy and self-deprecating stuff even. America will love it and warm up to whatever he wants to do. He ain’t no Richard Nixon and Nixon tried stuff like this…
I think, as long as the media is bent towards promoting Republican talking points, Obama has to use every opportunity to talk directly to the public. Yes, he runs the risk of people saying, “O, it’s him again,” and tuning out. But the alternative is allowing falsehoods to stand unchallenged.
In this morning’s case, I don’t think he reached many average citizens who have better things to do on a Sunday morning. These appearances were probably aimed more at the Villagers.
Everything any villager does is aimed at the other villagers, since nothing and no one outside the beltway exist for those folks.
I didn’t know he was into that.
Or did you mean Bill Clinton?
Oh.
Not that way?
Sorry.
Nevermind.
Your friend,
Emily Litella
No.
He doesn’t say anything new. Always the same old shit. Like today-did we hear anything new about healthcare reform? No. Didn’t even hear the words public option. Just that he thinks 80% of the awesome Baucus bill is fine and dandy. Never said a WORD about the 500 amendments to it.
Please. I will listen when he says something exciting. And he didn’t have a good explanation on the sink hole of Afghanistan.
Same old shit, different day.
I don’t think so too bad he doesn’t a copy of birth certificate with him and should call Joe Wilson a “jackass” too.
“carry”
Obama might after this be a bit overexposed in the national media, where they can but a hostile frame around everything he says.
But when he shows up in rural America, in areas with small media markets, the newsmodels there are so impressed with being able to interview the president, that they generally do a better job than the Villagers and the message gets through.
He ran this local media campaign seeking election. He’s done a little of it with the trips to Montana and Grand Junction, CO.
At some point, he’s going to have to wade into Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and West Kansas and West Nebraska and chat with folks.
It’s not that he’s overexposed. The problem is the White House does not have a multilateral media strategy. All they’ve got is Obama, and they are over-using him. Healthcare reform should have been sold through the stories of the real people being crushed by the current system. The entire month of August should have been filled with ads and events featuring regular Americans and their healthcare horror stories. Obama is a powerful advocate for his own cause, but you can’t play a baseball game and just put your star pitcher in the field. You need the rest of the team on the field too.
I don’t know if Gibbs, et. al., are just not up to the job, or if they’re just exhausted because they never got a break after the election. Anyway, Obama’s communications team is not doing the best it can for its boss. They need some new blood and some fresh ideas.
This is what happens when you fill your team with Republicans and Blue Dogs. Howard Dean should have been co-opted for Health Care, not Kathleen Sibelius. She could run the nuts and bolts daily operations, but Dean should have been a special temporary appointee to shepard health care through Congress.
true, plus… too much of the policy behind that relies on Rahm Emmanuel, whose courting of insurance companies and Blue Dogs threw the trajectory off.
I don’t think he’s been out there enough.
he needed to be out there pushing the public option in July.
Paul Krugman writes (in his column published today),
‘ I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
‘ That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that. ‘
Uh, apparently the president may not be smart enough to know that or, in any case, not well-informed enough to know that. I think it’s very easy to assume that, because the president is supposed to have such a dazzling information-apparatus working for him that he must be “in the know” about nearly everything.
In my view, Barack Obama’s intelligence and talents are greatly overrated. He always means well but, as one top Democrat once put it to George W. Bush in a too-rare moment of candor, “That [meaning well] isn’t good enough, sir.”