He's no longer Mr. Cool even to the liberal media who put him in the White House.He who was such a calm, collected and cagey candidate has turned out to be an inefficient, unengaged and increasingly thin-skinned President.
And the press is no longer much amused.
David Zurawik, writing in the liberal Baltimore Sun, describes how Obama's inept and already infamous "kick-ass" interview with Matt Lauer shows his mojo is on the wane.
[T]he president took thin skinned to a new level Tuesday morning in his interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show. I do not know what the president and his advisers were trying to accomplish with this conversation that took place in Michigan before Obama spoke to a high school graduation in Kalamazoo. But I have never seen Obama look and sound more petty, petulant and tinny.
Obama's big problem isn't that he can't act decisively, can't emote on cue for the cameras, trusts experts too much or that he defers excessively to CEOs. His problem -- and it is starting to look like a genuine fatal flaw -- is that he can't take criticism, particularly from the press, which he seems to have an unnatural and Nixon-like hostility toward. And this interview with Lauer showed that all too clearly...
Lauer asked Obama directly about the comparisons of the president's performance in the Gulf with that of George W. Bush during Katrina. That's when the "cool and elegant" Obama started getting riled and announced, "This is not theater... I don't always have time to perform for the benefit of the cable shows."
Really? This is the guy who has been on every cable channel in America it seems -- cooking steaks with Bobby Flay, shooting hoops and filling out NCAA brackets with any ESPN or CBS Sports analyst who shows up at the White House with a basketball, trading barbs with comedians and talk show hosts at the drop of a ht.
For most of his first year in office, it seemed as if Obama was always on TV in safe settings -- and no one played the TV-as-theater game better since John F. Kennedy. But not any more. The TV gods have abandoned Obama, and now, the more he tries to use TV to get on top of the Gulf disaster the more his contempt for the men and women who bring us news via that medium is exposed...
