Will Obama, like JFK, be all hype and no substance?
Remember the Arby's commercial from the early Eighties, which featured an elderly non-actress named Clara Peller confronting the guy behind the counter at a hamburger place with the question, "Where's the beef?" It made Clara a celebrity for a time. It even found a place in American political history when former vice-president Walter Mondale that question of his rival for the 1984 Democratic nomination, Gary Hart, who was running on a platform of "new ideas" that never seemed to make it into his speeches.
Molly Ivins- an extremely partisan but also very funny Democrat- wrote a book shortly after the election of George W. Bush entitled All Hat, No Cattle- a Texas idiom implying someone similarly big on talk but short on substance.
We may be about to enter an administration with the biggest, tallest hat of all time-but the cattle may be hard to find.
Herein Howard Kurtz- another Washington Post staffer exhibiting an objectivity uncharacteristic for his paper- examines the continued wave of uncritical adulation sweeping over President-elect Obama from the MSM.
This isn't just an unprofessional, virtually industry-wide outpouring of partisanship from the journalistic community on behalf of one of the candidates in a presidential election. This is something akin to worship- and it's worrisome on so many levels at once that I hardly know where to begin.
Kurtz quotes James MacGregor Burns in a New Republic piece from 1961, shortly after the election of the only other president whose reception by the MSM provides even a rough parallel:
"Obama's days of walking on water won't last indefinitely," Kurtz concludes. "His chroniclers will need a new story line. And sometime after Jan. 20, they will wade back into reality."
And not just his chroniclers. As Kurtz reminds us, a poll just a few days ago showed that 65% of the American people expect the country to be better off four years from now. It won't be, in most ways- and it remains to be seen whether Barack Obama's star quality survives the disappointment that ensues.
Obama's race has guaranteed him a place in history, regardless of what he does (or fails to do) after January 20. But given the size of the challenges he faces, even a far better qualified man would be hard pressed to make much headway. "Coolness" and status as a cultural icon are overrated when it comes to actually governing- as we're about to find out for the second time in my lifetime.
HT: Drudge
Molly Ivins- an extremely partisan but also very funny Democrat- wrote a book shortly after the election of George W. Bush entitled All Hat, No Cattle- a Texas idiom implying someone similarly big on talk but short on substance.
We may be about to enter an administration with the biggest, tallest hat of all time-but the cattle may be hard to find.
Herein Howard Kurtz- another Washington Post staffer exhibiting an objectivity uncharacteristic for his paper- examines the continued wave of uncritical adulation sweeping over President-elect Obama from the MSM.
This isn't just an unprofessional, virtually industry-wide outpouring of partisanship from the journalistic community on behalf of one of the candidates in a presidential election. This is something akin to worship- and it's worrisome on so many levels at once that I hardly know where to begin.
Kurtz quotes James MacGregor Burns in a New Republic piece from 1961, shortly after the election of the only other president whose reception by the MSM provides even a rough parallel:
"The Kennedy buildup goes on," James MacGregor Burns wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 1961. "The adjectives tumble over one another. He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows and digests whole books in minutes; he confounds experts with his superior knowledge of their field. He is omnipotent."The years have been kind to Kennedy in one way: the effects of the hype have lingered. A couple of years ago possibly the most clueless sample ever questioned for a national poll ranked him as America's greatest president, ahead of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson... well, you get the picture. Yet Kennedy's reputation among serious historians has not fared nearly as well. A man of very slightly above average intellect (his books were ghostwritten by staffers who were much smarter than he was), his legacy is that of a mediocre president at best, whose accomplishments were nil (to be fair, his presidency was so short that he hardly could have accomplished very much). For all its glitz and glamor of Camelot, Kennedy's assassination was the one thing that gains him more than a passing mention in the history books. Glitz and glamor may well raise expectations, but they seem no particular predictors of success in fulfilling them.
Soon afterward, Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs debacle.
"Obama's days of walking on water won't last indefinitely," Kurtz concludes. "His chroniclers will need a new story line. And sometime after Jan. 20, they will wade back into reality."
And not just his chroniclers. As Kurtz reminds us, a poll just a few days ago showed that 65% of the American people expect the country to be better off four years from now. It won't be, in most ways- and it remains to be seen whether Barack Obama's star quality survives the disappointment that ensues.
Obama's race has guaranteed him a place in history, regardless of what he does (or fails to do) after January 20. But given the size of the challenges he faces, even a far better qualified man would be hard pressed to make much headway. "Coolness" and status as a cultural icon are overrated when it comes to actually governing- as we're about to find out for the second time in my lifetime.
HT: Drudge
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