Balz Is Back; Shapiro Makes Two A Trend

This is perceptive. I agree that a lot of the success of the Obama campaign stemmed from his patience and tendency to ignore the Drudge-Politico-Halperin cycle.

One of the reasons I think Obama did better than… I’ll just say “other candidates”…other candidates might’ve been sucked into John McCain’s reactive, hysterical style. Suspend the campaign! Fly back to Washington (to sit in a chair)! Reacting to every headline, being drawn into every non-troversey.

Michael Scherer:
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“Now that Barack Obama’s second prime-time press conference is over, it is safe to make lasting pronouncements about the fledgling president’s East Room Q&A style.”
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What is this garbage?
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“On a substantive level, the press conference provided an illuminating window into Obama’s style of argumentation.”
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What?
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“The press conference gave us an opportunity to talk about the President’s style. In terms of the substance of the President’s remarks, let me return to the subject of style.”
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Is Shapiro’s piece some sort of joke, like a piece in the Onion?
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“On a substantive level”, we learned a lot about Obama’s style?
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Or is that this guy’s notion of “a substantive level”?
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“there are intriguing things to be learned about his presidency from his performance last night”
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Ooohh! Intriguing…Performance…What is this, a review of the Met’s latest production of Puccini’s “La Rondine”?
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“perhaps Obama’s boldest decision…the testiness of the usually self-disciplined president…the president commented archly…”
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Who is this guy…Rex Reed?
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“Of course, if cable television news and talk radio followed the Obama Doctrine, there would be long intervals of gape-jawed silence during the broadcast day.”
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Wow.
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If these circus side-shows followed “the Obama Doctrine”, the country might not have had to suffer through eight years of the worst Presidency since Andrew Johnson. Is this some sort of criticism? Is that what this pompous fruit is getting at…he found listening to the President tedious?
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There is no more telling window into the vacuous, fatuous superficiality-obsessed Village mentality than this revealing piece.
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Thanks for linking to it, Michael Scherer. It’s sole value lies in how demonstrative it is of the degenerate, overt intellectual poverty of our political press corps elites.

As usual, The Onion beats the MSM to the story.

The thing is this: If the media are so jacked up about BHO making news, than they have to ask him some new questions. With one or two exceptions last night, they asked the same old sh*t they’ve been asking for weeks: When’s the economy going to turn around, what about the deficit, blah, blah.

I think BO gave great, well thought out answers (The president being able to articulate both policy nuts & bolts as well as the overriding rationale for individual pieces of policy off the top of his head in real time is something we haven’t seen in 8 years), but the questioners asked him the same old sh*t.

Michael-Maybe we should go back to these type of press conferences:
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sure weren’t boring.

Normally journalistic convention requires three events to justify a trend, but we are jumping the gun because, frankly, the networks are not likely to pre-empt their lucrative evening programming next month to give Obama a third chance to fail to make news at a news conference.
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This is perhaps the second stupidest thing I’ve read all day. The evidence for my “Michael Scherer is a slapnuts” case builds.

Balz is back, baby! If there’s anyone who noticed that he left, raise your hand. Now, raise your other hand. Now, await further instructions.
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Meanwhile, I think one of the major problems with the MSM is that none of them have an “engineer” mindset. That is, they don’t know how something goes from a plan to an actual project and they don’t know how those who do various types of engineering and related disciplines have to plan ahead in case things go wrong.
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That (partly) helps explain why politicians can state wacky plans that have huge flaws and MSM reporters will just write down what those politicians say without being able to recognize those huge flaws.
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Discuss.

“That (partly) helps explain why politicians can state wacky plans that have huge flaws and MSM reporters will just write down what those politicians say without being able to recognize those huge flaws.”
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Amen

What is this crap from Balz.
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“Whether things are truly moving in the right direction — and whether, if they are, it is thanks to his policies or other, larger forces at work in the economy — are questions that can’t yet be answered. Obama’s message Tuesday was interpreted as “trust us and give us time” — but what he really seemed to be saying was, “I trust myself.”
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Haven’t any of you actually been listening to Obama? He’s been saying that (a) truly fixing the economy will take years and (b) the Dow is a stupid way to judge whether or not the economy is healthy. We’ve spent the past 8 years with an economy that was driven solely by debt. It only LOOKED healthy because we were living on credit.
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The actual rot in the economy has been going on for decades because we have shipped much of our manufacturing capacity overseas while allowing our education and health capabilities to fall far below Europe and Japan. Infant mortality in Cuba is better than it is here. Fixing all of these problems will take years of steady work and serious thought.
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Time’s contribution is a blogger who thinks that Dan Balz and Walter Shapiro writing at a rag like The New Republic are worth celebrating.
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We need a better media. Judging from those terrible questions you guys, you are terrible at your jobs. In related news, Ed Henry from CNN now carries his ass around in a brown paper bag.

Thought I would come back and beat up on Scherer some more.
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Here is a tip for Scherer and the rest of his fellow lesser lights in the media (here’s looking at you Mara Liasson and Juan Cole): the big stories in the future are not going to be about Obama. The real stories are going to be about us.
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Can the people of the US use the stimulus money to build infrastructure (roads and trains) to reconstruct our transportation system? Can the people of the US use the forthcoming budget money to rebuild our energy system? Can the people of the US – despite the best efforts of the AMA – create a health care system that actually delivers health care rather than profits for insurance companies? Can the people of the US – working with teachers and local school boards – transform American kids into the smartest in the world?
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As Obama said in Denver, the story isn’t about him. He’s right. The story is about us. Can we overcome the nonsense from the Republicans and their moronic supporters in the media (here’s looking at you Washington Post editorial page) to actually focus on solving problems.
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THAT is the story, Scherer. You need to get out of Washington. Stop reading Balz, Shapiro, Halperin, and Drudge and start reporting. Figure out how to tell our story.

Style: yes please. Substance? Oh No…

“That (partly) helps explain why politicians can state wacky plans that have huge flaws and MSM reporters will just write down what those politicians say without being able to recognize those huge flaws.”
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Amen

Oh my god, I just realized that SZ and Rusty are the same person and he’s been playing us all along!!
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Other than their twin posts, this whole thing is a yawn.

somepeoplelikeit:
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SZ and Rusty are the same person
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Behold the ideology of centrism in action!

From Shapiro: “Even though a CBS New poll found that a quarter of Democrats and more than 40 percent of independents disapproved of Obama’s handling of the AIG tempest,”
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That glass is a quarter empty huh?

Oops, forgot to turnoff italics, but I think you get my drift.
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SZ, you could only fool us for so long! Now that I know Rusty is just your creation I…well, I guess it’s still just funny and irrelevant.

Meanwhile, back in $10-billion-dollars-a-month-land:
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16 Killed in Baghdad Bombing
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By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: March 26, 2009
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A bomb in a parked car exploded near a bus station in Baghdad’s Shaab district early Thursday afternoon, killing 16 and wounding 35, according to the Ministry of Interior.
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The victims were primarily women and children, the ministry said.
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The bombing is the second major attack in the Baghdad area this week, after a bombing in Abu Ghraib on Monday that left at least 9 dead…

somepeoplelikeit
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Shapiro is full of sh*t
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http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/economy/poll-everyone-is-to-blame-for-aig-mess-except-obama/
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The number who blame Obama for the bonus fiasco — seven percent — is the smallest here, tied only with “all equally.”

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Its always interesting when pundits try to pervert polls to fit a meme they are trying to push.

Well since this thread is pretty much open…
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I’m in Texas and would love to see a piece on violence on the border with Mexico and how our drug policies are fueling these cartels and funneling huge amounts of money away from places that need it.
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Or we could talk more about how Obama uses a teleprompter.

SG, Sargent says: It gets even weirder than that…

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It’s “weird” people aren’t blaming Obama. Wow.

“But he learned from his campaign that the velocity of information can instantly change the conventional wisdom, for better or worse, and that there is no more to be gained from trying to anticipate those shifts than from trying to time the market.”
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They (and we) should keep this in mind the next time we all jump on the “blame Obama/Geithner for the AIG mess”.
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Pay particularly close attention that this is a pundit from WaPo!
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Appearantly, given the events of the past few days a few of us, who shall forever remain nameless, ought to keep this firmly in the front.