FOXNews.com: Romance Gone Sour: Behind the media’s anti-Obama backlash

FOXNews.com FOX News Network - We Report. You Decide. // via fulltextrssfeed.com

Refresh your vocabulary. Learn a new word everyday by subscribing to Word of the Day. A great tool if you're studying for the GRE, GMAT or LSAT, or simply want to enhance your lexicon. From our sponsors

Romance Gone Sour: Behind the media's anti-Obama backlash Sep 19th 2013, 11:00 By Howard Kurtz Published September 19, 2013 FoxNews.com Sept. 10, 2013: President Obama walks along the West Wing Colonnade toward the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.AP It is official: The mainstream media have turned on Barack Obama. Look no further than yesterday's piece in Politico, headlined "What's Wrong with President Obama?" Okay, there was also an accompanying piece on what's right with President Obama, but it's the first one that captured the Beltway zeitgeist. The big-name columnists who are pummeling the president are the same liberals who have mainly defended him in the past. It's not just one issue either. They are exasperated by what they see as his passive leadership style. Conservative commentators, for their part, are firmly in "we told you so" mode. To read these missives from the left, you don't get the sense that Obama is merely going through a rough patch. The clear implication is that his second term is unraveling, and there's not much hope of recovery. The straight news accounts are also painting a presidency in peril, often dumping on his White House staff and comparing them unfavorably to the Rahm and Axe team of Obama's first term. Politicians go through these cycles and often recover. Remember when Obama blew the first debate against Mitt Romney and some critics said his campaign was doomed? But the erosion of his media base, at a time when many liberal politicians are opposing him, is a troubling sign for the president. Even George W. Bush had a conservative cheerleading squad at the nadir of his popularity. Obama, not so much. Let's start with the Politico piece by John Harris, the site's editor, and Todd Purdum. "Washington is awash in brutal critiques of the Obama leadership style," they write. "The president's harried, serial about-faces on Syria, coupled with the collapse of Larry Summers's candidacy for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, have combined to highlight some enduring limitations of Obama's approach to decision-making, public persuasion and political management. Across the capital, anxious friends and chortling enemies alike are asking: What's wrong with Obama?" There is a bow toward "Washington's impatient pack-of-wolves phenomenon," that's the press and political class baring its fangs, but that doesn't soften the blow. Maureen Dowd tees off on the president for going ahead with an economic speech bashing Republicans on Monday, even as the Navy Yard was in crisis after the mass shooting there. "The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore,' she writes. "With a shrinking circle of trust inside the White House, Obama is having trouble establishing trust outside with once reliable factions: grass-roots Democrats and liberals in Congress." When Obama defended his Syria policy to George Stephanopoulos by saying that Washington likes to grade on style points, it ticked off Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus. "Style points? Seriously? Style points? That's what President Obama thinks the criticism of his zigzag Syria policy amounts to?" she writes. "As presidential spin, this is insulting. As presidential conviction — if this is what he really believes — it's scary." Is the president stung by such criticism? Here's a tidbit from MSNBC's Richard Wolffe in his new book "The Message," about Obama's reaction to critical editorials in the New York Times. "After each negative editorial, the president would summon his communications team to discuss the critical coverage," Wolffe says. "It was a deeply unpleasant experience for his staff, who bore the brunt of the presidential outbursts." Obama called Andy Rosenthal, the Times' editorial page editor, to complain, but only after aides scrambled to find his number. That's a far cry from 2007 and 2008, when much of the media was swooning over Obama. But then, governing is harder than campaigning, and no honeymoon lasts five years. Is all this criticism a bit over the top? I'll give the last word to Politico's counter-story. "Perhaps Barack Obama can comfort himself with the reality that his current travails are both more complicated in their causes and less dire in their consequences than they are being portrayed in the Washington echo chamber."

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions