One little-known fact about the world of journalism is that news organizations prepare obituaries of famous people while those people are still alive, so that packages of material will be ready to go when a death is announced.
Over the past week, journalists have been writing articles that have the quality of these sorts of pre-obituaries — only the event they’re anticipating isn’t the last breath of an individual but the defeat of President Obama’s re-election bid.
Even more striking, these journalists aren’t conservatives indulging in their deepest wish, but rather liberals who admire Obama and want to see him win a second term.
Al Hunt, who was for decades the voice of liberal conventional wisdom as the Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, declared yesterday in his Bloomberg column that Obama “needs an intervention.”
Channeling the view of a dozen unnamed leading Democrats, Hunt said “the central challenge” is for Obama to craft “a compelling narrative from the president and campaign, which [these Democratic sages] describe as unusually insular and arrogant.”
The Obama people won’t listen, he complained: “Any outreach by Obama’s Chicago acolytes to hear out these arguments is limited and superficial. A longtime Democratic strategist predicts defeat unless there is some boldness.”
E.J. Dionne — perhaps Obama’s most devoted op-ed-writing fan — reported that campaign honcho David Axelrod was finding it necessary to buck up the staff because it has become clear their guy may lose. “Obama,” Dionne lamented, “is not blessed with the opportunity to be simple.”
Romney, you see, can be simple because he can say Obama’s policies haven’t worked. What a gyp!
Obama, Dionne continued, “has to show that he knows things are bad for a lot of people but also insist that his policies made things a whole lot better than they would have been. He has to argue that the Republicans are blocking his proposals to improve the economy, but he doesn’t want to look like a politician inventing an alibi.”
All of the president’s good work — which, in the view of these writers, includes the stimulus and ObamaCare — is simply too difficult to defend in the face of the “easy” Romney attacks.
This behavior should be familiar to anyone familiar with the behavior of political journalists from time immemorial — and it should worry Obama supporters.
Read More at New York Post
