Political do-overs in the Octomom era
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
March 23, 2009
In the era of the Octomom, public rehabilitation is only as far away as the next news cycle. And that’s exactly what the Obama administration is counting on as it brings its bank bailout back into view this week.
If mega-mommy Nadya Suleman can get a media makeover, maybe Wall Street can too. Suleman is the single, jobless woman whose latest round of in vitro fertilizations yielded eight children in January, bringing the total size of her test-tube brood to 14. A month ago, there was wide opprobrium for Suleman after she appeared on the “Today” show. Suleman claimed creepy victim status, saying that people denouncing her reckless reproduction were attacking her because she had bravely chosen to be a single mother — the medical oddity as Murphy Brown.
Even in the world of freak-show television, it was too much. Coverage of the attention-hungry woman dwindled to the occasional, reproachful talk show segment and, of course, the prime chronicler of celebrity depravity, TMZ.
But as Suleman started bringing her children home from the hospital last week, the tone had changed. Among mainstream outlets from the Los Angles Times to the Gray Lady of pop culture television, “Entertainment Tonight,” Suleman was again being cast as a sympathetic, if still sensational, figure.
Reporters scrambled to gain the first pictures of the octuplets’ nursery and for one-on-one interviews with their mother. Internet sideshow no more, Suleman was back in the spotlight.
Neither shame nor modesty, being outdated concepts anyway, kept Suleman and her publicists from diving back into the piranha-filled waters of public life. They knew that reporters needed to keep the story going and would be credulous about the incredible in order to get access.
Light-years away on the media spectrum from Suleman’s carnival act was Barack Obama’s interview with Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. As staid and friendly as a coffee klatch, Obama was at his affable best in the interview.
Kroft has been lending a sympathetic ear to Obama since the then-senator set out on the campaign trail and began telling, as CBS calls it, “what may be the greatest American political story ever told.” (You can buy a DVD of two years of Croft’s slow pitches, “Obama: All Access,” from CBS for only $19.98.)
Kroft seems overeager with Obama, like the white guy who won’t stop raving about how much he loves soul food and Miles Davis when he visits the new black neighbors. And that style was on display this week. A swing set for the girls? Remarkable! The first lady has planted a recession garden? How wise.
Obama, for his part, did seem like a great new neighbor for America. A nice guy who likes to put people at ease.
But every bit as sensational as Octomom’s fake lips was Obama’s pitch on rescuing America’s financial sector.
At this time last week, Americans realized that failed mortgage insurer American International Group had been paying big bonuses to executives. By Friday, congressional Democrats were passing a bill to confiscate the bonuses that they themselves had voted in February to allow.
It was a sad sight, but it showed lawmakers know voters now feel their skepticism about pumping billions into private firms was well-placed. The already unpopular bailouts became as toxic as subprime mortgage debt.
It is in this environment that the president is putting forth his idea to have the Treasury become the new AIG. In order to get hedge funds to buy up toxic debt, Obama is proposing that the Treasury provide loans up front and insurance against potential losses on the back end. It’s what Paul Krugman called “heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose.” By the way, it may cost another $1 trillion.
In light of the two months of fiscal flailing by Secretary Tim Geithner and the rest of the administration, Krugman and other liberals want more government control over bailout recipients and aren’t worried about the cost as much as the direction.
Conservatives, meanwhile, are calling the bailouts folly and demanding that the market be allowed to run its course, even if it means deeper short-term disruptions. And the $10 trillion that was added to the budget deficit forecast has them pleading for a pause.
But the administration is hoping that Americans need something to work in the banking world as desperately as an “Entertainment Tonight” reporter needs an Octo-exclusive.
It may work for Obama with Kroft as well as it worked for Suleman with Mary Hart, but folks at home are still bound to think that it all sounds pretty crazy.
