Back from book leave, the Washington Post’s Dan Balz weighs in with a spot on analysis of Barack Obama’s slow and steady style.
It’s easy to think of this president as the embodiment of the Internet age. His campaign skillfully exploited new media to build a nationwide network of donors, volunteers and advocates. This is the president who demanded that he keep his BlackBerry, which is symbolic of the always-on, always-connected culture that accelerated the flow of information. 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.
And Walter Shapiro, writing over at The New Republic, makes a trend out of two.
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.