Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Good grief!
WaPo's Howard Kurtz notes the media hype surrounding the coming of the Obama Presidency. Obama is going to have a tough time achieving any success in the face of great challenges, while winning some degree of confidence from the 46% of the American electorate who did not vote for him and keeping the support of another 5%-7% who might well have not voted for him were it not for the financial collapse. It's going to be impossible for him to live up to the hype.
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Obama should have every word he has ever spoken thrown back at him now. He promised a new kind of politics, didn't he? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that means a better kind, a more honest kind. So let's give him the opportunity to live up to his words, if only for our own amusement.
ReplyDeleteHe created the hype, and it got him what he wanted. Now it's time for him to pay the piper.
Intentionally or not, you write about this as if Obama didn't have anything to do with it.
Bull. It's not just "the hype." It's Obama's hype.
I certainly agree that Obama and his campaign worked hard to creata as much hype as possible. That's what campaigns do, in order to win. But now, it's in Obama's interest to lower expectations, since realistically, no President can do all the things he promised to do.
ReplyDeleteThe Howard Kurtz piece I linked illustrates why this will be very hard to do -- because Obama's legion of fans in the media are not about to stop hyping him. In fact, as Kurtz points out, now the various over-the-top promotions about the guy are helping to sell newspapers and magazines and boost TV ratings.
So Obama is in something of a bind for the moment -0- no doubt wanting to bask in the glory while realizing he needs to damp down expectations even among his biggest boosters.
It's pretty hard to tamp down the expectations when your campaign is based on extraordinary claims of change - remember - the oceans stop rising, the earth started cooling and so on - it's a new day which looks strangely like yesterday.
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