Walter Shapiro: Fix the Country Already!

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Fix the Country Already!

by Walter Shapiro


Lawrence Jackson / AP Photo

Fifty days into Bamalot and we still have war, recession, unemployment. Walter Shapiro wonders if the media’s hyperactive coverage give the president a chance to, you know, do something.



As we breathlessly near the end of Barack Obama’s eighth week in office (almost enough time to have two full William Henry Harrison presidencies), a definitive verdict on the success or failure of the 44th president is long overdue. Probably at this very moment pollsters are in the field asking swing voters, “Are you better off than you were two months ago?” House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, who is fast emerging as the television face of the Republican congressional leadership, has already definitively decreed, “It’s the Obama stock market and the Obama economy.” Obama himself has upped the ante by going after the AIG bonuses with a ferocity that George W. Bush reserved for the "Axis of Evil" and anyone who interrupted his workout routine.

With a dozen different national polling organizations charting thepresident's approval rating this month (the answers range from 52 to 67 percent), it is hard to imagine what other data historians could possibly need before concluding that Obama rates between Chester A. Arthur and James Polk on the Presidential Success Meter.

Laggards and slackers may want to wait to render a judgment for the ages until Obama’s 100-day mark, but that Rooseveltian presidential benchmark (so beloved by news magazines and newspaper feature editors) is so 20th century. Waiting a near eternity until the end of April all but guarantees running smack up against the first book publishing wave of Obama-in-the-White-House reminiscences. It is tempting to picture a Tom Daschle memoir entitled Almost coming to a remainder table near you.

Our political culture has become so hyperactive that it is almost impossible to joke about the way that speed kills serious thought. Cable-television news is so opinionated and so unreflective that it has proven far more likely to rot your brain than traditional risky behavior like masturbation. The Politico routinely ballyhoos micro-scoops like this one from last Friday: “Dee Dee Myers was at the W.H. meeting with Ellen Moran and David Axelrod. ‘The rest is top secret,’ she told POLITICO 44.” (What a shocker: a Bill Clinton press secretary consulting with the Obama communications team.)

Mark Halperin’s page at Time magazine promises “Politics Up to the Minute.” Nearly 20 months before the congressional elections, it is conceivable that even hard-core campaign junkies could take a deep breath and wait for “Politics Up to the Hour.” Unless, of course, you believe that future control of the House will pivot around what happens between 2:18 and 2:47 on a slow Tuesday afternoon in March of an odd-number year.

The truth is that technology has created an online world where every speech, every snippet from a TV interview, every photo-op can be parsed and pureed for its political content. Not even the tiniest twig from a tree falls unnoticed in this media forest. During the 2008 campaign, a new generation of armchair horse-race fans thrilled to every Rasmussen tracking poll, every Nate Silver regression analysis, every Obama blog entry, every campaign spot immortalized on YouTube, and every Sarah Palin public appearance. True, all the kinetic energy squandered on hitting the computer’s refresh button could have heated New England for the winter, but the entire enterprise was a harmless diversion proving that democracy can be fun.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-17/fix-the-country-already/full/