They love him to death

NBC thrills at his fly-killing prowess. ABC News gives him a day (and two hours of prime time) to pitch his health care agenda, no critiques permitted (not even paid ads). Anchors swoon, kvell, and flutter when in his presence, the Fox News Network being the only, and lonely, exception.

The White House Press office and the network news have become as one entity. When Obama joked at a press dinner about being in bed with the network news anchors, his listeners giggled. They knew it was true.

But the strange thing is that all these effusions have had no effect upon public opinion, or have had an effect in reverse. While Obama was compared to God by Evan Thomas of Newsweek, (which has been busily writing both of His testaments), the president’s poll ratings declined five points in most major surveys; while the number of those who “dislike him strongly” increased.

Even among those who like him in person, support for his issues took a still bigger beating: Majorities disapproved of his takeover of General Motors, disapproved of his spending and expanding the deficit, and sided against him (and with Dick Cheney!) over “torture,” security issues, and Guantanamo Bay.

There is a bloc that approves of Obama and most of his policies, and a bloc that likes neither, but there is also emerging a bloc in the middle that likes him as a concept but not as a leader, epitomized often by Christopher Buckley, who endorsed him last year on the strength of his “temperament,” and now is hoping his policies fail.

The upshot is that Obama’s personal ratings are slowly deflating, while support for his programs has dropped like a rock, all in the face of a frantic press effort to elevate both of them. But doesn’t the press help shape public opinion? Well, not any more.

It all went downhill from the Iowa caucus, and all went to prove love is blind to proprieties, as the press and the Obama campaign became one. Linda Douglass of ABC News left to work for Obama, and nobody thought that this was a problem.

Before the vice presidential debates, it came out that moderator Gwen Ifill was about to publish a book that flattered Obama, and all of her friends said that this wasn’t a problem.

After the election, Jay Carney of Time went to work for Joe Biden, which wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t a problem when The New York Times ran a gratuitous hit job on Cindy McCain, or when The Washington Post ran a story about the water that glistened on Obama’s chest muscles as he rose Neptune-like from the surf.

From then, it was a short step to calling him Kennedy; to calling him King; to calling him Roosevelt; to calling him Lincoln; and to calling him God; to the point at which voters (or at least the few who were still watching network news or reading the Times, Time, or Newsweek) began to yawn and/or giggle, and to factor these raptures out of their consciousness.

The power of the press to influence things started to fade, and then to diminish. And dwindled to nothing at all.

The press always feared it would die by being censored, suppressed by the state, or hounded by demagogues like Joe McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, Richard M. Nixon; the dark visaged figures it always despised.

But it emerged from these travails stronger than ever, having made heroes of Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R. Morrow, and Uncle Walter, who turned the country against LBJ’s war.

Nobody dreamed it would be done in by itself and its own misplaced passions; by Jason Blair, Howell Raines, and identity politics; by Dan Rather and the 1970’s anti-Bush papers that turned out to be written on Microsoft Word.

No one dreamed disaster would come in the form of a slim, graceful, bi-racial messiah, who lured it instead into fits of self-induced lunacy. It perished of love, as did so many others. The death to which he was loved was its own.

Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”