It is amazing that in 32 years the so called mainstream media has not changed at all in terms of its political slant,what has changed is that it does not carry the same weight as it did in 1980 due to the advent of the internet.
Peter Baker of the New York Times informs us in a "news analysis" that "for Barack Obama, a president who set out to restore good relations with the world in his first term, the world does not seem to be cooperating all that much with his bid to win a second." Thanks a lot world, you ingrate!
The world's perfidy notwithstanding, "polls show Mr. Obama with a double-digit advantage over [Mitt] Romney on foreign policy," Baker notes. But in a cruel twist of fate, "in the latest New York Times-CBS News poll, only 4 percent of Americans picked foreign policy as their top election concern."
Fate is cruel to Obama in more ways than one: "If anything, the dire headlines from around the world only reinforce an uncomfortable reality for this president and any of his successors: even the world's last superpower has only so much control over events beyond its borders, and its own course can be dramatically affected in some cases. Whether from ripples of the European fiscal crisis or flare-ups of violence in Baghdad, it is easy to be whipsawed by events."
All indisputably true. It's also true that into every life a little rain must fall, but that's not much of a defense for a poorly performing employee whose boss is considering whether to renew his contract.
Lately we've seen a spate of articles blaming Obama's failures on impersonal forces beyond his control. Thus Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:
Lost in the chatter about whether President Obama will win a second term in November is an even bigger--and perhaps even more important--question: Is it possible for a president--any president--to succeed in the modern world of politics?
Consider this: We are in the midst of more than a decade-long streak of pessimism about the state of the country, partisanship is at all-time highs and the media have splintered--Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth--in a thousand directions all at once. . . .
"Due to the evolution of our politics and media, we may never see a two-term president again," said Mark McKinnon, a senior strategist for President George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
We are going to go out on a limb and predict that we will see another two-term president, though perhaps not this year.
"In the same years when presidential politics changed so greatly, governing did, too," writes the Times's Tom Wicker: "It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues--energy and the economy, for instance--are more complex than they were."
Hey, wait a minute. Didn't Tom Wicker die last year?
Why yes he did. That quote came from a column he wrote in April 1980, the last time a Democratic president was in the midst of an unsuccessful re-election bid. And he's not the only one whose 32-year-old plaints sound awfully familiar.
Associated Press/Corbis
Jimmy Carter was known for his bright smile.
"The Presidency today is entangled in the great crisis of all established authority," wrote Henry Graff, a Columbia University historian (now emeritus) in the Times July 25, 1980. "Executives of every kind--political, educational, ecclesiastical, corporate--are under incessant public attack." The president's life, Graff wrote, "is under such relentless scrutiny that he can only seem ordinary, never extraordinary. No man is a hero to his valet, and America is now a nation of valets."
Graff did not mention Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth.
"Watching President Carter try to juggle all the contradictory foreign and domestic problems of the nation during a presidential election and an economic recession, you have to wonder who can do it and who can govern America," wrote James Reston, another Times columnist, in June 1980.
Reston, who died in 1995, concluded: "Carter's campaign theme is clear. It is that while the economic figures are not on his side, the economic 'trends' are changing for the better, and that, as he hopes to demonstrate in his meetings with world figures, he knows more about foreign policy than [Ted] Kennedy, Reagan or [John] Anderson."
Then again, it's easy to be whipsawed by events.
"The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world," declared the subheadline of a Jan. 13, 1980, Washington Post story, whose author, Walter Shapiro, has since ascended to Yahoo! News.
Titled "Voters Expect to Elect a Mere Mortal," the Shapiro story (quoted by the Media Research Center) observed: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. . . . Some voters have entirely discarded textbook notions about presidential greatness and believe that Carter is doing as good a job as anyone could in facing new and difficult problems and in coping with an independent and restive Congress."
In August 1980 (in a story not available online), Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser, now an editor, described the speech in which Carter accepted the Democratic nomination:
President Carter in 1980 had to try to explain why he had not become the sort of leader Jimmy Carter promised to be in 1976. . . .
Not surprisingly, this 1980 Carter sounded much more defensive. Carter's 1976 acceptance speech contained no negative references to . . . Gerald R. Ford. it was entirely a positive statement.
About a fourth of last night's speech was devoted to lambasting the Republicans and Ronald Reagan. If the Grand Old Party should win in November, Carter said, "I see despair . . . I see surrender . . . I see risk." He also sees repudiation, of course, which explains his defensiveness. . . .
Carter's acceptance speech in 1976 was a magical moment, perhaps the high point of his political career. Carter spoke quietly that night in the lilting cadence of a Baptist preacher with a sure sense of himself and his message. . . .
There was no magic in Thursday night's speech. Instead, a weary convention heard the sounds of slogging from a worried politician who knows he is in deep trouble.
Listen closely and you can hear the sounds of slogging echo across the decades. They emanate not just from the failed president but from sympathetic journalists trying to absolve him of the responsibility for his failure.
We learned in the 1980s that the presidency was still big. It was Jimmy Carter who turned out to be small.
